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The Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing (ICESDF) will hold its third session on 3-7 March at UN Headquarters in New York.

While the session is closed, reserved to the Committee, an open interactive multi-stakeholder dialogue will be organized on Monday, 3 March from 3 to 6 pm.?The first part of this dialogue will consist of a briefing from the Co-chairs and thematic co-facilitators on the work of the Committee. The second part will see presentations from a panel composed of three to five representatives from NGOs, the private sector and other Major Groups engaged in the Rio+20 Conference and the Financing for Development process.

This will be followed by an open dialogue around strategic questions related the Committee’s work on thematic cluster two (mobilization of resources and their effective use) and cluster three (institutional arrangements, policy coherence, synergies and governance issues), with the Committee experts, Member States, international organizations and non-state actors.

There will also be an open joint meeting of the ICESDF and the Open Working Group on sustainable development goals on Wednesday, from 10:00 to 13:00, where the co-chairs of the ICESDF will brief the Open Working Group on the work of the Committee and discuss how the work between the two processes complement each other. Both derive their mandate from the?UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20)?and will contribute to the intergovernmental negotiations on the post-2015 development agenda.

The Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing was established in follow-up to Rio+20 with a mandate to prepare ¡°a report proposing options on an effective sustainable development financing strategy to facilitate the mobilization of resources and their effective use in achieving sustainable development objectives¡±. To this end, the Committee was tasked to asses financing needs, consider the effectiveness, consistency and synergies of existing instruments and frameworks, and evaluate additional initiatives.

More information, including summaries of the first two sessions, are available on the .

Regional Seminar on the Promotion and Utilisation of Census Results: Making Value Visible, will take place in Pretoria, South Africa, on 24 – 26 March with over 40 African countries represented.

UN DESA’s Statistics Division, in cooperation with Statistics South Africa and the UN ECA African Centre for Statistics and the support from the African Development Bank and UNFPA, is organising this event with?essential objective to discuss lessons learnt and share national experience from the 2010 round of population and housing censuses, with regard to effective strategies for promoting the dissemination and utilisation of census results.

In addition, the event will provide an opportunity to gather the input of African countries based on their experiences towards the revision of the 51³Ô¹Ï Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses, the major international guidelines for the next round of population and housing censuses.

For more information:

UN DESA is currently conducting a study of cooperatives throughout the world, presently placing its focus on cooperatives in China and India.?

A database will be prepared showing consolidated and sector-level data on cooperatives across industries. The data will include as many cooperative sectors as possible (e.g., financial services, agriculture, credit unions, social and public services, commercial sales and marketing, housing, utilities).

To gather the data, the study will use existing data sources both from government ministries and cooperative associations. The project will compile the number of cooperatives, the number of clients or members served by each cooperative, and the number of offices. To the extent possible, the project will also compile key economic indicators including annual turnovers, annual gross revenue and total assets at the national level.

For more information: