For many years UNESCO has been developing software for the benefit of Member States in strategic areas, such as information handling and retrieval, data mining and statistics.

Undoubtedly, the most popular has been CDS/ISIS, a free (of charge) software for creating, updating and searching textual databases.  While project managers have an official register of 130,000 institutions and individuals using this software, number or reports suggest that the real number of beneficiaries over the years can be multiplied exponentially.

For many years UNESCO also developed a cutting edge software package for the validation, manipulation and statistical analysis of data, developed by the UNESCO Secretariat with the help of specialists in statistics and informatics from different regions of the world.