The adoption of international standards is essential to producing internationally comparable official statistics. However, as the particular case of the adoption of SDG indicators demonstrates, this is by no means a linear process. According to FAO’s SDG data gap assessment conducted in 2019 and other statistical capacity assessment reports (e.g. World Bank, AfDB…), financial, professional and technological capacities of national statistical agencies vary greatly between countries and regions, as does the level of political support and commitment to statistics. These differences call for more targeted interventions by international institutions to support the uptake of statistical standards. To face this challenge, FAO is increasingly building the capacity of its regional and country offices to better mainstream food and agricultural statistics in regional and national cooperation strategies and activities, while also stepping up its resource mobilization efforts. Regional roadmaps are currently being rolled out to support countries in adopting food- and agriculture-related SDG indicators and other statistical standards, taking into consideration regional particularities, the impact of UN reform, action plans developed by UN Regional Commissions and other relevant regional partnership opportunities. This paper will highlight some of the key regional differences in countries’ capacity to adapt to statistical standards, describe FAO’s regional targeted interventions in the context of food and agricultural statistics, and discuss the remaining main challenges.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Global Indicator Framework (GIF) has multiplied training needs due to the large number of new indicators to be monitored by countries, whereas COVID-19-related social distancing restrictions have provided an unexpected springboard for the proliferation of cutting-edge virtual training tools and modalities. This has exposed a panoply of new data-related skills needed by contemporary statisticians, and therefore the types of training that could be most appropriate for acquiring these skills. This paper analyses the changing context and nature of training, with particular reference to the experience of FAO as a custodian agency for a large share of SDG indicators. The combination of different learning modalities, appropriately blended into a coherent learning programme, is shown to have the greatest impact, with one modality reinforcing the strengths and dampening the limitations of another.