The Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) will host the 6th Asia-Pacific Directors General Forum for South-South and Triangular Cooperation in November 2024. The platform facilitates South-South and triangular cooperation among its 62 member States and associate members to address development challenges and harness opportunities. 

Considering the need to effectively quantify South-South and triangular cooperation, the forum provides a platform to discuss how national agencies led by their technical cooperation agencies can formalize measurement of SDG indicator 17.3.1 relating to South-South cooperation leveraging the Manual for the Framework to Measure South-South Cooperation, developed by pioneering countries, with the support of UNCTAD. ESCAP’s Statistics Division and UNCTAD, as well as other UN Regional Commissions, are jointly working together to implement a UN DA15 project supporting Southern countries in piloting the UN Framework. 

The meeting objectives are:

• Discuss conceptual issues regarding the measurement of South-South cooperation
• Showcase examples of how other countries have addressed challenges to measure South-South cooperation
• Raise awareness amongst ESCAP members and how they can take practical steps to formalize measurement of South-South cooperation within their respective countries.