Good practices in monitoring and reporting on the Millennium Development Goals: National lessons from Latin America

Much work has been carried out on the notion of good practices in many fields of development. This refers to specific initiatives (projects, programmes, experiments) that have been identified as valuable and that can be replicated with positive results in other situations. The experiences described in this document are those in which the work of monitoring the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has served to improve the quality of statistical production and broaden its dissemination, to enhance inter-agency coordination in the area of national statistical systems, and to promote the effective use of statistics by national policymakers in order to fulfil the commitments undertaken at the Millennium Summit. These include initiatives that have improved access to and increased the use of social and environmental statistics through the production of harmonized microdata and the construction and dissemination of metadata, the mobilization of funds to produce disaggregated indicators at the subnational scale within countries, and the design of mechanisms for inter-agency coordination that have allowed better sharing of statistical information among countries, thereby improving coordination and cooperation among various national institutions. In this respect, all these initiatives have successfully used the MDGs to obtain official assistance for the promotion of statistical activity within countries. Understanding these initiatives and processes is of particular interest at the present time, as the deadline for meeting the targets approaches and discussions about what should be done after 2015 have initiated. The intent here, then, is to identify what has worked and what has not at the national level in terms of statistical production, monitoring and reporting on the MDGs.