The UN System is helping countries improve their capacity to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). To support this collective effort, a comprehensive set of services to support MDG-based national development strategies has been designed.

These services focus on three pillars:

• MDG-based diagnostics and investment planning (technical and financial assistance needed to achieve the MDGs over the long term);
  
  
• Widening policy options and choices (sectoral and cross-sectoral policy reforms and frameworks needed to accelerate growth with equity and promote long-term human development), and;
  
  
• Strengthening national capacity (enable effective service delivery at the national and local levels).
  Source: www.undp.org

Apart from these three pillars, the United Nation trough the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on Millennium Development Goals Indicators (IAEG) has been in charge of monitoring the global progress and informing the public and policymakers on progress towards achieving the Goals.

The IAEG on MDGs is responsible of defining the MDG indicators, improve the availability and the quality of the statistical information and improve country capacities to carry out their own progress evaluations.

The Inter-agency and Expert Group on the Millennium Development Goal Indicators is responsible for data development and analysis for the assessment of trends in the implementation of the Millennium Declaration. The group is also concerned with the development and application of standard statistical concepts and methods for national and international uses in compiling data for the MDG indicators.

The group includes the United Nations Secretariat, a number of UN agencies, IMF, OECD and the World Bank, national experts from statistical offices, and representatives from other organizations concerned with the development of data for the MDGs at national and international levels–such as Paris 21 and IDB.

This group -coordinated by the Statistics Division of the United Nation- meets twice a year to review methods, standards and available data for the agreed indicators and reviews and analyses trends for each of the quantifiable goals and targets. Representatives from ECLAC Statistics and Economic Projections Division attend regularly to these meetings.