Abstract:

The Research Agenda on Ageing for the Twenty-First Century (RAA-21) is a joint project of the United Nations Programme on Ageing (UNPoA) and the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics (IAGG). RAA-21 was developed through a series expert consultations convened in 1999-2000 and organized by the Centre for Ageing Studies, Adelaide, Australia, in cooperation with UNPoA. RAA-21 was endorsed by the Valencia Forum in April 2002, and its final version was presented at the Second World Assembly on Ageing in Madrid, Spain and published by IAGG in 2003. Within the United Nations, RAA-21 is recognized as an important tool for supporting the implementation and monitoring of policy actions proposed in the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing. The United Nations General Assembly, in its resolution 57/177 in 2002, welcomed the adoption by the Valencia Forum of the Research Agenda on Ageing for the Twenty-First Century, and in 2005, the General Assembly called upon governments to consult and utilize the Research Agenda on Ageing as a tool for strengthening national capacity on ageing (General Assembly resolution 60/135). During 2003, a series of workshops2 were held focusing on the formulation of regional research priorities, where possible in connection with the elaboration and adoption of regional strategies for the implementation of the Madrid Plan of Action. The brief reports of these workshops were published in the July 2003 and May 2004 IAGG Newsletter3. In 2005, in conjunction with the Eighteenth Congress of IAGG, the UNPoA and IAGG convened an expert workshop in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to review and update RAA-21. This publication consists of two parts: the 2007 update of RAA-21 and the report of the Rio workshop