A road map to deal with the “unprecedented demand for granular, comparable and timely data” is the subject of a report by Partners for Review and the Partnership in Statistics for Development in the 21st Century (PARIS21). The recommendations focus on supporting national goverments in the SDG review process.

The October 2019 publication titled, ‘National SDG Review: data challenges and opportunities,’ is written by Karina Cázarez-Grageda and Koffi Zougbebe. The authors explain that the 2030 Agenda, particularly its call to “leave no one behind,” and other international agreement require countries to collect, analyze and produce data on over 230 indicators.

In this context, most countries presenting voluntary national reviews at the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) have reported facing challenges concerning data and statistics, according to Johannes Jutting, PARIS21 Executive Head, and Thomas Wollnick, Partners for Review (P4R) Head of Programme, in the foreword to the paper.

The authors note that some countries’ national statistical offices (NSOs) have begun to explore the use of data produced in a wider “data ecosystem” made up of civil society organizations, academia and the private sector, in addition to official, “traditional” sources like statistical agencies, line ministries and central banks. To harness data from this extended set of actors, there is a need to build three types of capacity:

• Technical skills and knowledge: Ensure quality of data, process and classify data from external sources, and increase understanding of SDG indicators and the tier classification system;
• Transparency: Improve non-official data providers’ transparency regarding their data production, and equip traditional data actors to experiment with new data sources; and
• Management: Prepare national statistical systems to engage with multiple data actors and coordinate the participation of multiple data providers.

The paper underscores that capacity development is needed for all parts of the new data ecosystem, including both traditional data providers – which should strengthen their abilities to process, validate and classify data from alternative sources – and “new” data actors, which should work to better understand requirements related to quality of data and statistics for official reporting, and the SDG indicator framework.

The paper proposes a road map to address these capacity needs, with steps including: identification of stakeholders and their roles; identification of data and capacity needs; and improvement of the SDG review process. Among possible actions, it suggests issuing guidelines for new data actors on how to make their data available to official data providers, to help improve their knowledge of data quality requirements.

Partners for Review (P4R) is a transnational multi-stakeholder network for representatives of government, civil society, the private sector and academia involved in the national review and follow-up of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The network was set up on behalf of Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and its Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU).

PARIS21 was established by the UN, the European Commission, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. It promotes the better use and production of statistics throughout the developing world by facilitating statistical capacity development, advocating for the integration of reliable data in decision making, and coordinating donor support to statistics. [Publication: National SDG Review: data challenges and opportunities]