CIET is an international group of professionals from a variety of disciplines, including epidemiology, medicine, planning, communications and other social sciences, who bring scientific research methods to community levels. By involving people at these levels in information gathering and analysis, CIET helps them to participate, in an increasingly informed way, in decisions that affect their lives. Through both formal and on-the-job training over a series of reiterative survey cycles, CIET shares its collective skills and its methods with national, regional and local planners to help develop local stakeholder information systems and build indigenous capacities for evidence-based planning and action. CIET is also an academic centre, based at the Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero in Mexico that provides formal training in evidence-based planning through short courses and an intensive eight-week course as well as through diploma, masters and doctoral programmes. In addition to New York and Mexico, it also has offices in Nicaragua, Pakistan, London, Ottawa and Johannesburg