Services offered

Objective
The objective of Statistics Sweden’s International Consulting office is to provide qualified statistical consulting services world wide outside the EU on a cost recovery basis. The consultancies cover all aspects relevant for planning, production and dissemination of statistics.

Working models

Twinning/Institutional Cooperation
Twinning is a mode of cooperation that ICO has been using since the beginning of the 1980s. Twinning means a long-term cooperation with a sister organization in another country. The cooperation fosters close professional ties between the institutions as well as between individual civil servants and experts in the cooperating countries. The twinning agreement ensures the recipient institution of access to experts in all domains of statistics.

In a twinning arrangement, transfer of knowledge and skills is a given priority in order to permit the recipient institution to build its capacity to carry out the work without assistance. Sustainability is the keyword.

Some basic features of our long-term cooperation model are the provision of:
-one or more long-term resident consultants
-short-term consultants for a few weeks input of expert knowledge
-a project coordinator at the ICO, who is responsible for contacts with the project and for the recruitment of consultants
-study visits to Sweden and/or other countries
-training courses mainly in statistics, IT and English


Regional projects
In addition to national projects regional projects are aimed for a number of countries in a region. For example, ICO has three regional projects in Western Balkans; in gender statistics, in environment statistics and in statistical methodology.

Funding
ICO has an annual turnover of about US$ 11 million. The majority of our projects are funded by Sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency). International organizations and individual countries are also customers of our services.

We are also taking part in international consortiums funded by the EU, the WB and others in projects where statistical capacity building is included

Countries
Currently we have ongoing projects in about 30 countries all over the globe. There are also some projects with a regional approach for regional training and competence development. 

ICO staff and consultants
ICO has twelve staff members responsible for the administration, coordination and development of the international consulting services. ICO is using consultants from the entire Statistics Sweden, and when needed also external consultans, to provide qualified assistance to statistical capacity building.

Some Key indicators 2006