South Africa’s Statistician-General, Risenga Maluleke, and the Ambassador of Sweden to South Africa, Cecilia Julin, have launched the Goal Tracker portal for South Africa. The Goal Tracker initiative supports citizens and policymakers in tracking progress towards the SDGs, and identifying gaps and priority areas for action.

Each Goal Tracker is built on a foundation of core features and data visualisation tools that can be adapted to any country. Together with local partners, the project aims to analyze available data and customize a platform for each country. It draws on national statistics as well as data from the UN, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank, as well as innovative sources including citizen-generated data, satellite data, telcodata and big data.

The Goal Tracker is open-access and open source, but each country-specific platform is owned and run by the government in the respective country, usually through its Ministry for Planning and/or National Statistics Office. In addition, local partners receive training in order to take ownership of the work.

The Goal Tracker for South Africa was launched on 2 December 2019, at Statistics South Africa in Pretoria, South Africa. Through the portal, SDG data will be publicly available in an interactive, user-friendly format. The Tracker provides also information about South Africa’s national policies related to achieving the SDGs that, paired with the data made available, can offer improved tools for decision-making, resource allocation and enhanced collaboration between all stakeholders in support of the SDGs.

According to the project, South Africa has data available for 128 of the 199 SDG indicators, or 64%. The Tracker is to be constantly updated with the most recent data on SDG until 2030. In addition, new features are expected to be developed including tools to visualize non-traditional data, linkages with Agenda 2063 (for African countries) and budgets linked to the SDGs. [Goal Tracker South Africa] [SDG Knowledge Hub sources]