In consultation with various partners from recipient countries and donor institutions, PARIS21 has prepared guidelines, primarily to assist developing countries to design their NSDSs, but they will also be useful to development partners—including civil society, consultants and international partners providing technical and other forms of assistance to countries—to improve the quality and use of statistics for better management for development results.

The guidelines are not prescriptive, given the wide variations in countries and organisations that are using them. The guidelines are based on a wide body of knowledge that has built up over the years, especially with the Managing for Development Results agenda and experience with PRSs; MDG country reports and international enabling programmes for statistical capacity building such as GDDS, MISP, STATCAP Master Plan, UN Handbook on Statistical Organization, etc.; and experiences of different countries, in the design of NSDSs. But the guidelines are necessarily broad and sufficiently general to provide an introduction for an NSDS design team coming to some of these concepts for the first time. The guidelines are under-pinned by more detailed ‘How to’ notes within the extensive NSDS Knowledge Base.