Official launch of CountrySTAT-Afghanistan

24/03/2015

The Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will organize the Official Launch of CountrySTAT system for Afghanistan. The event will take place in the Central Statistics Organization’s Conference Hall, on the 11th of March 2015 in Kabul, Afghanistan.

CountrySTAT is web-based information system on food and agriculture which provides easy access to statistical data of good quality that can aid decision-makers in better, evidence-based policy-making and greater efficiency in development politics. Nationally owned and maintained, it serves as a one-stop centre that enables the collection and harmonization of timely and reliable official data from different sources and their integration in a common location. Data provided through CountrySTAT serves researchers, policymakers, development organizations, and the private sector to design and implement better policy and investments in agriculture.

The last report on State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI 2014), published annually by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) has confirmed a positive trend which has seen the number of hungry people decline globally by more than 100 million over the last decade and by 209 million since 1990-92. 

With the number of undernourished people remaining "unacceptably high", the agency heads stressed the need to renew the political commitment to tackle hunger and to transform it into concrete actions. CountrySTAT system is an innovative tool for sharing agriculture and food security information, using the FENIX platform and future technological developments such as the Open Data Network and web-based geospatial data management applications, semantic search engines and mobile data collection.

Best practices of the CountrySTAT system: ownership and sustainability, increased data availability/accessibility through the national one-stop centre on food and agriculture statistics. Future Vision: strengthening sustainable development of rural and agricultural statistical information targeting better integration of new scalable information technologies, to support food security and decisionmaking based on facts.