Just like many Syrian families escaping the violence in Syria, Noor (36 years old) and her family arrived to Lebanon one year and two months ago as she precisely puts it, and sought refuge in the Southern parts of Lebanon.

BUSAN, Republic of Korea (Joint news release) – The Asia-Pacific Interagency Task Team on Young Key Affected Populations launched the New Generation (NewGen) Asia initiative today at the International Congress on AIDS in Asia-Pacific (ICAAP). NewGen Asia engages young people from or working with young key affected populations as leaders and active participants and empowers them through a multi-faceted capacity-development programme.

JAKARTA – UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is pleased to facilitate collaboration between the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) and the Central Agency on Statistics (BPS) that has resulted in the provision of population data for the national disaster management programme, announced UNFPA Representative Jose Ferraris at the National Seminar on Optimizing Population and Secondary Data for Disaster Management, held on 5 June.

VIENTIANE – Seventeen years ago, 179 countries, including Lao PDR, met in Cairo, Egypt for the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). The outcome of the conference was a twenty-year Programme of Action with concrete strategies to promote human rights and dignity, support family planning, sexual and reproductive health and rights, advance gender equality, insist on equal access to education for girls, and eliminate violence against women, as well as focus on issues relating to population and protecting the environment.

BAMYAN PROVINCE, Afghanistan – “No one has done a survey here before, and nobody knows the type of challenges we face here,” said Mohammad Ibrahim, a farmer from the Bamiyan province during the enumeration phase of the first large-scale data collection conducted in Afghanistan since the 1970s.

“I don’t know the exact number of people living here. It must be a lot,” Ibahim added.

Clearly ‘a lot’ is not sufficient information on which to plan schools and health clinics, roads and other infrastructure.

BANGKOK (ESCAP) – Leading statisticians and senior officials from 41 Asian and Pacific countries agreed Friday to ambitious steps to improve environment and social statistics, critical in the context of the post-2015 development agenda, and endorsed a strategy to improve civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems in the region.