The UN Secretary-General has issued a report describing the work by the Statistics Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), in cooperation with other entities of the UN system, in support of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The report will inform the discussions at 56th session of the UN Statistical Commission (UNSC).
The report (E/CN.3/2025/8) outlines the work carried out to prepare the annual report of the UN Secretary-General on progress towards the SDGs (A/79/79- E/2024/54), the efforts to update the Global SDG Indicators Data Platform, and work on data and metadata exchange.
Among other efforts, it highlights work under the UNSC’s UNdata modernization project, including the launch of the ‘UNdata Commons for the SDGs’ platform, in partnership with Google Data Commons. According to the report, this “new platform integrates authoritative data on the Goals and insights from across the [UN] system into a public knowledge graph with advanced natural language search functionality and interactive, user-friendly visualizations.” The goal is to allow for “seamless exploration of diverse statistical data sets, the annual global report on the Goals, and analytics, to ultimately facilitate informed, data-driven decisions.”
The report also includes updates on:
- the Data for Now initiative and additional capacity-building efforts;
- the collaborative on the use of administrative data for statistical purposes;
- advocacy efforts for capacity building for data and statistics for the SDGs;
- the Global Network of Institutions for Statistical Training;
- the Global Network of Data Officers and Statisticians; and
- the work on citizen-generated data, including efforts to finalize and implement the Copenhagen Framework on Citizen Data.
The UNSC assists the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in:
- promoting the development of national statistics and the improvement of their comparability;
- the coordination of the statistical work of specialized agencies;
- the development of the central statistical services of the Secretariat;
- advising the organs of the UN on general questions relating to the collection, analysis, and dissemination of statistical information; and
- promoting the improvement of statistics and statistical methods generally.
The UNSC’s 56th session will convene in New York, US, from 4-7 March 2025, under the theme, ‘Better Data, Better Lives.’ The Commission consists of 24 member countries of the UN, elected by the ECOSOC on the basis of an equitable geographical distribution for a term of four years. [Publication: Work for the review of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals: Report of the Secretary-General]