July 2018: Ireland has created an online portal to track the country’s progress towards achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The portal was presented at the July 2018 session of the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), alongside Ireland’s Voluntary National Review (VNR). The portal tracks indicator data across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The portal follows on the May 2018 release of Ireland’s SDG National Implementation Plan 2018-2020, which provides a whole-of-government approach for implementing the Goals. The online platform includes publicly available data relating to the SDGs as well as the EU’s adapted set of SDGs, and measures Ireland’s progress against each Goal on the basis of those two sets of indicators.

On the portal, indicator data can be accessed by clicking on the related SDG icon. When an indicator is selected, the platform automatically maps and displays the indicator datum at the smallest geographic area to which it is dissaggregated. Users can click on geographic areas to access data or see all the information related to the indicator on a previewed data table. Data can also be accessed in a variety of formats allowing it to be easily downloaded, mapped and manipulated by users.

Beyond providing data in technical formats, Ireland’s portal also includes “story maps” and videos that provide a narrative to their work with the SDGs. These story maps allow non-technical users to visualize SDG data, and communicate the importance of achieving the 2030 Agenda in Ireland. During Ireland’s presentation at the 2018 HLPF, Pádraig Dalton from the Central Statistics Office of Ireland highlighted the importance of “making data accessible and digestible for policy makers.”

The Central Statistics Office developed the portal in partnership with Ordnance Survey Ireland and Esri Ireland. Esri is a private-sector company specializing in data and spatial analytics. On 11 December 2017, Esri and the UN Statistical Division (UNSD) announced a partnership to work with UN Member States to “utilize a data hub that will allow countries to measure, monitor and report on the SDGs in a geographic context.” Esri has also developed data portals with: Mexico, the Philippines, the State of Palestine and the UN Statistics Division for its own SDG open data hub. [Ireland’s SDG data portal] [SDG Knowledge Hub story on National Implementation Plan] [SDG Knowledge Hub stories about other data platforms]