ECLAC is collaborating with statistical agencies from the City and Province of Buenos Aires in the development of the indicator system for the Buenos Aires metropolitan region and its statistical geoportal, REMEBA.

As part of its work program with the region's statistical systems, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has been promoting various projects and initiatives to strengthen national and subnational capacities for the design, construction, and implementation of statistical geoportals that improve the management, integration, and visualization of geospatially enabled statistical data.

For the past year ECLAC, through its Statistics Division, has been providing technical assistance to the Institute of Statistics and Census of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and the Provincial Statistics Directorate of the Province of Buenos Aires in the development of a system of indicators for the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires, complemented by a statistical geoportal called REMEBA. As part of a joint effort between the Statistics Division and the ECLAC Office in Argentina, the Commission has made progress in the various phases of the project, with two recent milestones standing out.

On the one hand, on June 27, 2025, the Second REMEBA Geoportal Workshop was held at the ECLAC offices in Buenos Aires. It was organized by the Commission's Statistics Division with the support of the ECLAC Office in Argentina. The event brought together more than 25 officials from the Institute of Statistics of the City of Buenos Aires (IDECBA) and the Provincial Statistics Directorate of the Province of Buenos Aires (DPE), as well as technical teams from ECLAC. The inaugural session included the participation of María Eugenia Lago, Director of IDECBA, and Diego Rusansky, Director of the DPE, along with the Officer in Charge of the ECLAC Office in Argentina and the Head of the Statistical Innovation and Dissemination Unit of the Statistics Division.

REMEBA Geoportal

This workshop reviewed progress in the construction of REMEBA and identified the key areas requiring special effort to achieve the proposed objectives. A roadmap was defined to complete the implementation of the geoportal and make it available to the public with all its features and information. The potential and scalability of this tool in other areas of statistical work were also analyzed, promoting the adoption of this tool by the teams at both institutions to continue exploring the inclusion of increasingly more information, new phenomena, and more innovative data relevant to the priorities of each institution.

On the other hand, the three institutions presented the progress of this initiative at the panel Challenges of integrating statistical and geospatial information in South America on the occasion of the XIX IDERA Conference (Spatial Data Infrastructure of the Republic of Argentine) held from July 2 to 4 in the City of La Plata, Buenos Aires Province.

María Eugenia Lago, from the Institute of Statistics and Census of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires; Diego Rusansky, from the Provincial Statistics Office of Buenos Aires; and Romain Zivy, from the ECLAC Office in Argentina, during their presentation at the 19th IDERA Conference.

REMEBA is a milestone for the region, as it is one of the first information systems to integrate data from two different jurisdictions, corresponding to one of the most densely populated areas in Latin America, after São Paulo (Brazil) and Mexico City.

The construction of REMEBA has been enriched by the constant participation of the teams involved in defining the set of indicators, methodological harmonization, choosing the IT infrastructure, and implementing the technological solution shared by the two jurisdictions. The work condensed in the portal is the result of three teams working side by side over a year, sharing the goal of creating a concrete and innovative product that provides relevant information for public policies and the general public, and that is accessible through the geolocation of information, its graphical representation, and applications that allow access, consultation, and download of available data.

This development driven by ECLAC is based on free software technologies, open and interoperable data, which facilitate the integration, visualization, and dissemination of information on web data platforms and portals under an easy-to-operate statistical and geospatial content manager.