1. Management Group on Statistical Cooperation
 NSIs participation in international TA activities: advantages and challenges of 'public partnerships'

2. Overall assessment: for a successful partnership
New challenges in the statistical cooperation and Key role of the NSIs
The implementation of the Agenda 2030
NSIs will play a central role to support the development and advancement of the capacity of statistical systems
Cape Town Global Action Plan
UNECE road Map on statistics for SDGs
"to build sustainable capacity and develop the skills to meet the challenges of modernization, transformation and compliance with European/international standards” and “with increasing demand for high quality data”
ESS role within the strategy for technical cooperation

3. Current issues from NSIs experience
Short (less than 2 years) multi-purposes projects often do not allow for sufficient time for the partners to go deep into each subject-matter and focus on concrete, time-bound achievable results
Short projects also run the risk of not allowing the beneficiaries to acquire sustainable capacity
Strict rules/requirement of some types of contracts (like Service Contracts) make it difficult for some NSIs to bid for contracts, since they often do not have the organizational capacity to ensure the logistical and operational management for such projects
Limits coming from huge amounts of working days to be spent in the project countries: NSI staff has to perform their daily functions as well

4. Promote and enhance partnership
High expertise within NSIs is well recognized and has to be used for cooperation
Encourage, disseminate experiences carried out by NSIs
Sharing efforts among NSIs in providing technical assistance on different aspects (institutional building, modernization of official statistics, production by domain, integration of data sources, etc.).
Join the effort among NSIs working together
Cooperation with Eurostat on building project in statistics to be launched having in mind a multi-annual approach.
Support Eurostat in providing useful strategic elements to be considered in statistical project

5. The way forward: proposal of actions
Consultation processes and mechanisms (within MGSC) to collect needs and strategic elements to be included in ToRs and Fiches of Service contract tenders and Twinnings
Promotion of more projects following the institution-to-institution approach (like we see it in Twinning projects) should be ensured
Promote direct involvement of ESS NSIs, which have access to the most up-to-date knowledge on production, methodologies and best practices within the ESS (e.g. by the request that big part of the expert working days must come from NSIs)
Technical assistance could be financed through grant agreements, while logistics could be subject of a procurement procedure (service contracts) expertise of NSIs in the core statistical work (Institutional governance, Production of official statistics, Methodology, etc.)
Consultation process