The Economic Commission for Africa, African Center for Statistics (ECA-ACS), UNCTAD and the National Bureau of Statistics of Nigeria are organizing a National Workshop on Quantifying South-South Cooperation, from 17-19 December 2024, in Abuja, Nigeria. The voluntary Conceptual Framework (CF) for the measurement of SSC, was developed by countries of the global South and adopted by the UN Statistical Commission and the General Assembly in 2022. It came as a response to the request of the second High-level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation to all development actors to support initiatives for information and data collection, coordination, dissemination and evaluation of South-South cooperation (SSC). It was also “requested that further work on this, including on global reporting and capacity building, be enabled by the co-custodianship of UNCTAD and be led by countries from the global South, building on country-led mechanisms”. 

Consequently, a United Nations Development Account Project on measuring SSC was set up to meet these requirements and a Manual for the Framework to measure SSC developed by pioneering countries, with UNCTAD support. Led by UNCTAD, UN Statistics Division and four UN Regional Commissions, jointly with partners in the UN system, the project supports seven pilot countries (among which Nigeria) in Africa, Asia and Latin America to measure the financial and non-financial modalities of SSC to inform and target policy action with the aim to manage and mobilize resources for efforts to achieve the SDGs. 

The objective of the workshop is to strengthen the capacity of national agencies in Nigeria to identify, measure and report South-South cooperation flows for SDG indicator 17.3.1, as contributing factors to the 2030 Agenda.