The President of the UEMOA Commission and the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security of Burkina Faso, in collaboration with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), will organize the official launch of the Regional System of CountrySTAT - UEMOASTAT, on the 24th of February, 2015, in the premises of the Splendid Hotel in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

The excellent cooperation between the Committee on Economic and West African Monetary Union and the United Nations Food and Agriculture, has been evidenced once again by the success of the implementation of the project UTF/UEM/002/UEM "Support to the implementation and development of CountrySTAT system in Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Togo and the UEMOA Commission Headquarters", which will end March 31, 2015.

Indeed, considerable efforts have been made to carry out the various planned activities of the said project, which resulted among others with the official launches of CountrySTAT sites in Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Togo and of course, UEMOASTAT headquarters of the UEMOA Commission.

CountrySTAT is based on decades of experience of FAO in agricultural statistics including the development and implementation of the global database on agriculture - FAOSTAT, which is a reference for the all users worldwide. It uses the FENIX platform is a web-based system and open-source technology, providing flexibility to meet the different needs of users and projects globally, regionally and nationally.

FAO has developed a regional version of CountrySTAT, UEMOASTAT through an aggregation and concatenation work of statistical data and regional indicators in the region, works just as a one-stop center and as an online dissemination web-based tools, for retrieving quality statistics on food and agriculture, with international standards.

The establishment and development of CountrySTAT allowed each Member State of the UEMOA to strengthen collaboration between statistical institutions, including national statistical institutes, ministries of agriculture, livestock and fishing and other relevant institutions, either nationally or regionally.

The latest report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) on the state of the food insecurity in the World reported that about 805 million people were undernourished during the 2012-2014 period, 11.3% of the world population.

The overwhelming majority of them live in developing countries, where it is now estimated that 13.5% of the population are affected by malnutrition. 

CountrySTAT is the right tool available to policy makers, development partners and other users in the fight against hunger and poverty. Therefore, CountrySTAT and regional system UEMOASTAT facilitates planning and decision-making based on facts, in order to accelerate the process of reducing hunger and malnutrition.