The UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) launched a data dashboard for the SDG indicators to help its 56 European member countries monitor their progress on the 2030 Agenda. The platform presents data from its member states for 80 “regionally relevant” SDG indicators from across all 17 Goals.

The UNECE Dashboard for SDGs was launched on 13 March 2020, ahead of UNECE’s Regional Forum on Sustainable Development. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the RFSD will only convene for a half-day, online meeting on 19 March 2020.

Data disaggregation remains a major gap in monitoring the SDGs.

The Dashboard draws on data from the UN Global SDG Database. The 80 indicators included in the dashboard are listed at the indicator menu page.

The Dashboard allows users to:

• See “snapshots” by country, and compare countries;
• View differences between women and men;
• Create graphs and maps; and
• Access definitions and explanations. 

Users can download full datasets for more in-depth analysis.

Announcing the launch of the Dashboard, UNECE notes that a major gap in monitoring the SDGs is data disaggregation. Although the 2030 Agenda calls for examining indicators for specific population groups – broken up by sex, age, ethnicity, as well as migratory, disability and/or indigenous status – data collection still must be significantly increased to make this possible. UNECE reports that “to date, the only disaggregation offered in the UNECE dashboard is by sex, where possible with the currently-available data.”

UNECE adds that it is working to improve measurement in areas of the SDGs that are particularly hard to measure, including disaggregated poverty measurement, migration statistics, environmental statistics and indicators, climate change-related statistics, and statistics on children and youth.

The 2020 RFSD virtual meeting will take place on 19 March 2020, per this update on changes to UNECE meetings due to COVID-19. [UNECE press release]