Washington Group on Disability Statistics

The Washington Group on Disability Statistics was formed as a result of the United Nations International Seminar on Measurement of Disability that took place in New York in June 2001. An outcome of that meeting was the recognition that statistical and methodological work was needed at an international level in order to facilitate the comparison of data on disability cross-nationally. Consequently, the United Nations Statistical Commission authorized the formation of a City Group to address some of the issues identified in the International Seminar and invited the National Center for Health Statistics, the official health statistics agency of the United States, to host the first meeting of the group. The City Group format is one that has been used by the United Nations (U.N.) in numerous other occasions to address various problems in survey measurement and methodology, such as the Rio Group, which focuses on poverty statistics. The City Group is an informal, temporary organizational format that allows representatives from national statistical agencies to come together to address selected problems in statistical methods. A City Group usually develops a series of three to four working meetings and is named after the location of the first meeting.