Within an international community that becomes more overcrowded with policy agendas at the global and regional levels, making an investment case for data and statistics in the international sphere becomes more challenging everyday. Furthermore, a growing scarcity in development cooperation funds continues to hinder the fulfillment of SDG 17.19 “By 2030, build on existing initiatives to develop measurements of progress on sustainable development that complement gross domestic product, and support statistical capacity-building in developing countries”. 

The global data and statistics community has made significant progress in the positioning of the importance of advocating for better data for decision making in different scenarios with the organization of worldwide and regional events such as the World Data Forum and the Data Festival. Within this context between 2023 and 2024, the Latin American region will be on the spotlight of the international data and statistics community as major events will be hosted by countries of the region (Uruguay, Data Festival, November 2023), Statistical Conference of the Americas (TBC Chile or Dominican Republic, fall 2024), V United Nations World Data Forum (Medellin, Colombia, November 2024).

As such, the session seeks to spur the discussion among the leads of each of these events in order to draw the attention of what have been our achievements. What are we lacking? How can the Latin American region build upon these lessons learned in order to have a more prominent role in the global data and statistics community?