CountrySTAT is a well-established institutional and statistical system that provides technical assistance and strengthens capacities in several national and regional bodies to improve standardization and dissemination of quality food and agricultural statistics.

In the past three years, CountrySTAT has undergone a profound transformation in order to overcome a series of technical shortcomings and improve its ability to provide assistance at country level. The first step in this transformation was the replacement of the software called "PC-AXIS" (developed by Statistics Sweden), with the FENIX platform, which is partially open-source (unlicensed) and is used by various partners and FAO projects.

A mission was already undertaken by the ROs in April 2017 to investigate national needs and understand the situation of the country.
The objective of this second mission was to train national counterparts of the Ministry of Agriculture on the new platform. The final aim was to provide participants with basic training on the use of CountrySTAT and to promote the new system for comparing official statistics with the use of international coding systems and standardized metadata.
The training wanted to demonstrate CountrySTAT’s features and potential, its structure and technology. In particular, it has focused on:

• an overview of the New CountrySTAT system
• international coding systems (HS, CPC, DAC, etc.)
• the importance of using the metadata
• the CMS - content management system
• the data management tool
• viewing data online through graphs
• online data filtering

The training approach tried to balance conceptual and practical sessions.
The presentations made during the training are publicly available at the address: http://azerbaijan.countrystat.org/countrystat-documentation/en/ 

Staff at the MoA have been very valuable. Concepts were immediately caught and constant work has been done all over the three days. And at the end of the three days training there have been uploaded 108 datasets.