A World that counts: mobilising the data revolution for sustainable development

This report from the UN's Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development (IEAG) proposes ways to improve data for achieving and monitoring sustainable development. The report highlights two big global challenges for the current state of data: the challenge of invisibility, for instance gaps in what we know and when we know it; and the challenge of inequality, including the gaps between those who know and those who do not know what they need to know make their own decisions.

The IEAG report makes specific recommendations on how to address these challenges, calling for a UN-led effort to mobilise the data revolution for sustainable development:

1. Fostering and promoting innovation to fill data gaps. New technologies offer new opportunities to improve data, if they are used for the common good. The group proposes a programme for experimenting with how traditional and new data sources (including big data) can be brought together to provide better and faster data on sustainable development, and developing new infrastructures for data development and sharing (such as a “world statistics cloud”), to share innovations that improve the quality and reduce the costs of producing public data.
2. Mobilizing resources to overcome inequalities between developed and developing countries and between data-poor and data-rich people. The group stresses the need for increased funding and resources, used both to develop national capacity and global data literacy, and for public-private partnerships to leverage private sector resources and knowledge in the global interest. The international conference in July 2015 to discuss financing for new Sustainable Development Goals provides an opportunity for this.
3. Leadership and coordination to enable the data revolution to play its full role in the realisation of sustainable development. The group proposes a global effort to improve cooperation between old and new data producers, to ensure the engagement of data users, and to develop global ethical, legal and statistical standards to improve data quality and protect people from abuses in a rapidly changing data ecosystem.