The seventeenth session of the ESCWA Statistical Committee will take place in Aljabal Alakhdar, Oman, from 8 to 10 September 2026. The session brings together Heads of National Statistical Offices from across the Arab region, along with regional and international organizations, to follow up on statistical activities undertaken by national statistical offices and the ESCWA secretariat since the Committee’s previous session, held in Manama on 22 and 23 October 2024. Participants will discuss ways to modernize statistical systems and strengthen their resilience in times of crisis, and member State representatives will share experiences on leveraging technology and artificial intelligence for statistical work and on modernizing national accounts. As part of its proceedings, the Committee will also hold a round-table discussion on improving coordination of statistical capacity development activities.

The ESCWA Secretariat has prepared the paper Strengthening statistics on refugees and internally displaced persons in Arab countries to outline ways to strengthen statistics on refugees and internally displaced persons in Arab countries, given the growing importance of such statistics in supporting development planning, humanitarian crisis responses, and the monitoring of affected populations. The document draws on the findings of a regional survey conducted by ESCWA in 2023, and updated in 2026, regarding member States’ practices in collecting and disseminating these statistics, and on discussions held at a regional workshop organized in Cairo in November 2024, in partnership with relevant international and regional organizations. It reviews progress made in strengthening statistics on refugees and internally displaced persons in Arab countries, and the gaps and challenges hindering such effort, offering proposals to address these issues, emphasizing the importance of leveraging international recommendations, fostering coordination among national statistical offices, government bodies and international organizations, and achieving data source integration.

Finally, the document proposes a regional framework to support capacity-building, the exchange of expertise and improved data source integration, while highlighting the role of ESCWA and other relevant international organizations in providing technical support and developing regional frameworks. It concludes with practical recommendations to enhance statistical work in this field. The Statistical Committee is invited to consider these recommendations and comment thereon.

The Committee is also invited to review a regional approach for implementing the Global Disaster-Related Statistics Framework (G-DRSF) in Arab countries, following its endorsement by the United Nations Statistical Commission in March 2026. It presents G-DRSF as a practical foundation for turning fragmented disaster-related data into coherent, comparable, and policy-relevant official statistics that can support anticipatory action, crisis response, recovery planning, and resource allocation. The paper identifies six priority areas for strengthening disaster-related statistics — institutional coordination, standards and methodologies, disaggregation and granularity, fragile and conflict-affected settings, coverage of exposure and vulnerability, and statistical capacity — and lays out a three-phase implementation pathway from governance and baseline assessment through pilot testing to institutionalization and regional scaling, with an initial implementation cycle envisaged for 2027–2030.