10 August 2016: The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics (UIS) launched the Sustainable Development Data Digest, to contribute to monitoring of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 (Ensure inclusive and equitable education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all) and to address gaps in education data and monitoring. The Digest presents a global strategy for improving measurement of education quality and equity.

The first edition of the Digest, ‘Laying the Foundation to Measure SDG 4,’ finds that the world as a whole only collects about half the data needed to monitor the global education targets, with even larger gaps in disaggregated data that is needed to monitor and ensure that everyone achieves each target. The Digest suggests a strategy for UN agencies, countries, donors and civil society groups to collect data and implement a new measurement framework to monitor SDG progress.

The strategy focuses on difficult-to-measure areas, such as education equity, inclusion, learning and quality, and recommends collecting different types of information, especially on learning outcomes. The Digest suggests, for instance, how parity indices can be used to track education inequalities among children and youth based on their sex and socio-economic and disability status, which it stresses will help to illustrate how “inequities play out across education levels” rather than providing only a snapshot of a single education level.

The Digest aims to provide statistical information that countries and other stakeholders can use to bring about change. For example, the Digest has released a new indicator on school readiness, which suggests that children benefit from exposure to formal learning one year before they begin primary education. In a blog, UIS Director Silvia Montoya argues that this information signals the need for increased investment in early stages of education.

UIS is mandated to produce data to monitor progress on SDG 4. UIS is collaborating with partners including the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning, the Technical Cooperation Group on SDG 4 – Education 2030 Indicators and the Inter-Agency Group on Education Inequality Indicators on the development of tools to support data and monitoring efforts. Also as part of these efforts, UNESCO launched an eAtlas for Education 2030, in July 2016. [UNESCO Press Release] [UIS Blog] [Publication: Sustainable Development Data Digest: Laying the Foundation to Measure Sustainable Development Goal 4] [IISD RS Story on eAtlas]