At the end of the second session of the Regional Conference on Population and Development held in the City of Mexico, Latin American and Caribbean countries agreed today an Operational Guide for the implementation of the Montevideo Consensus as a voluntary technical instrument of assistance for the compliance of the priority measures on population contained in the document adopted in 2013.

The meeting, held from October 6-9 –attended by representatives from governments, international organizations and civil society- was organized by the Government of Mexico and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), with the support of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

The delegates also agreed that, based on the operational guide, the countries would define lines of action, goals, terms and indicators and would draw up national reports regarding the implementation of the Consensus, which would be presented and revised during the third session of the Regional Conference, to take place as agreed in El Salvador in 2017.

The Montevideo Consensus, adopted in Uruguay in the Conference’s first session, is the most important inter-governmental agreement in the region regarding population and development, and includes measures on the integration of the population with sustainable development and on the areas of childhood, adolescence and youth, ageing, sexual and reproductive health, gender equality, migration, territorial inequality, indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants.

After the first revision of the launching at a national level in 2017, a regional evaluation will be carried out during the Regional Conference’s fourth session, in 2019, with the goal of identifying gaps and challenges in common and to propose regional strategies to strengthen the implementation of the Consensus.

In order to do this, a work group will be created to prepare a revision and specification proposal of the Operational Guide’s indicators that will be used for the regional monitoring of the Consensus. These indicators should be precise, comparable, concrete and aligned with those that emerge from the process related to the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development and the follow-up of the International Conference on Population and Development Program of Action after 2014.

To this end, the Conference called for the use of national official data in the creation, preparation and analysis of the indicators to be used in the follow-up of the implementation of the Montevideo Consensus and appealed the countries to carry out the necessary efforts to improve date sources and to encourage the gathering of national statistics, among other means, through technical assistance.

At the same time, the Regional Conference, which acts as the inter-governmental organ in charge of the regional follow-up of the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing, requested ECLAC to continue facilitating the process of examination and evaluation of applying this Plan, adopted in 2002, as well as the San José Charter on the rights of older persons in Latin America and the Caribbean, approved in 2012.

ECLAC will carry out this work through the provision of technical consultancy to the countries in the region that request it to carry out their national examination and evaluation during 2016; the organization of the Fourth Regional Intergovernmental Conference on Ageing in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2017, which will be held in Paraguay; and the preparation of a regional report based on these activities as a contribution for the world examination and evaluation of the Madrid International Plan of Action in 2018.

Simultaneously, the Conference exhorted the countries to sign and ratify the Inter-American Convention on Protecting the Human Rights of Older Persons, approved this past June 15, at the forty-fifth period of regular sessions of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States.

Additionally, it called on the United Nations Open-ended Working Group on Ageing, established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2010 that, as from its seventh period of sessions, will focus on the task of preparing a proposal that will contain, among others, the main elements of a legal international tool to promote and protect the rights and dignity of older persons.