PROGRAMME OF ACTION OF THE UN ICPD
Actions
12.3. Governments of all countries, particularly developing countries, assisted as appropriate through bilateral cooperation and international organizations and, where necessary, through interregional, regional and subregional cooperation, should strengthen their national capacity to carry out sustained and comprehensive programmes on collection, analysis, dissemination and utilization of population and development data. Particular attention should be given to the monitoring of population trends and the preparation of demographic projections and to the monitoring of progress towards the attainment of the health, education, gender, ethnic and social-equity goals, and of service accessibility and quality of care, as stated in the present Programme of Action.
12.4. Programmes for the collection, processing, analysis and timely dissemination and utilization of population and related development data should include disaggregation, including gender disaggregation, coverage and presentation compatible with the needs of effective programme implementation on population and development. Interaction between the community of data users and data providers should be promoted in order to enable data providers to respond better to user needs. Research should be designed, taking into account legal and ethical standards, and carried out in consultation and partnership with, and the active participation of, local communities and institutions, and the findings thereof should be made accessible and available to policy makers, decision makers, planners and managers of programmes for their timely use. Comparability should be ensured in all research and data collection programmes.
12.5. Comprehensive, reliable, qualitative as well as quantitative databases, allowing linkages between population, education, health, poverty, family well- being, environment and development issues and providing information dissaggregated at appropriate and desired levels, should be established and maintained by all countries to meet the needs of research as well as those of policy and programme development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. Special attention should be given to assess and measure the quality and accessibility of care through the development of suitable indicators.
12.6. Demographic, socio-economic and other relevant information networks should be created or strengthened, where appropriate, at the national, regional and global levels to facilitate monitoring the implementation of programmes of action and activities on population, environment and development at the national, regional and global levels.
12.7. All data collection and analysis activities should give due consideration to gender-disaggregation, enhancing knowledge on the position and role of gender in social and demographic processes. In particular, in order to provide a more accurate picture of women's current and potential contribution to economic development, data collection should delineate more precisely the nature of women's social and labour force status and make that a basis for policy and programme decisions on improving women's income. Such data should address, inter alia, women's unpaid economic activities in the family and in the informal sector.
12.8. Training programmes in statistics, demography and population and development studies should be designed and implemented at the national and regional levels, particularly in developing countries, with enhanced technical and financial support through international cooperation and greater national resources.
12.9. All countries, with the support of appropriate organizations, should strengthen the collection and analysis of demographic data, including international migration data, in order to achieve a better understanding of that phenomenon and thus support the formulation of national and international policies on international migration.