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The Data Countries Need Now: Outcomes from Data For Now’s Inception Workshop

By Alyson Marks and Maryam Rabiee

This week, representatives from eight very diverse countries (Bangladesh, Columbia, Ghana, Mongolia, Nepal, Paraguay, Rwanda, and Senegal) convened in Kigali, Rwanda to discuss priority data needs; specifically, the kinds of timely (even real-time) data they need to effectively track sustainable development. In spite of varied data priorities across the countries (from poverty, to agriculture, to education) commonalities emerged that can expedite the accessibility, timeliness, and quality of data, such as focusing on the better use of satellite imagery and co-investing in administrative data.

The meeting was the inception workshop of the Data For Now initiative. Data For Now aims to identify and address challenges to the production of timely, accessible, and quality data for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As a core operating partner, SDSN TReNDS met with country partners and stakeholders to facilitate discussions on national priorities, including land use, poverty, human mobility, education, and administrative data.

Over the course of the meeting, six cross-cutting themes emerged, related to the importance of having a clear operating framework, the need to innovate but not dismiss crucial, traditional data systems, and to use a coordinated, holistic approach;

1. Key Objectives are Needed From the Outset – To build successful partnerships across stakeholders and sectors, parties need to be aligned around a common purpose. Identifying these objectives at the initial stages is critical for aligning partner incentives and engagement.

2. Peer Review Mechanisms are Key for Capacity-Building – Partners need to work together to identify what works and what doesn’t. Capacity-building needs to be done in line with other aspects of the project and cannot be done in silos.

3. An Enabling Environment is Crucial for Securing Buy-in – National Statistical Offices (NSOs) need to be willing to make the changes needed to improve data collection and consider the adoption of new methods to complement existing official statistical methods. Political support and alignment with other offices, including ministries are also critical for success.

4. Don’t Dismiss the Importance of Administrative Data – While there are challenges with using administrative data, throughout the workshop, it was identified as a key source for NSOs to improve the timeliness and granularity of their data to inform decision-making on the SDGs.

5. Satellite Imagery and Earth Observation Data Can Fill Gaps – The importance of geospatial methods to complement official statistics, such as censuses and surveys cannot be overlooked. These innovations bring significant value to supplementing the traditional data sources and can lend themselves to improving the granularity of data, particularly with small-area population estimates. However, there is a need for more robust training on the technical components. Our POPGRID project is a useful tool for addressing these population estimation needs.

6. A Holistic Approach is Essential – We need to target data gaps and challenges holistically. This means thinking about the issues technically, but also strategically. For example, it’s important to take advantage of local knowledge that exists in-country and ensure that these partners are included in the project planning from the beginning.

What’s Next?

The workshop provided TReNDS with the opportunity to identify technical and policy areas that require further development at both the local and national levels. To narrow the data gaps and ensure the sustainability of the initiative, TReNDS key objectives moving forward include:

  • Connecting Data for Now country partners (NSO representatives and other country-level policymakers) to national and regional universities and SDSN Member Organizations. The academic and scientific community have the knowledge to assess and develop methods and tools. TReNDS will assist with making them more accessible to county needs.
  • Linking identified data gaps, national priorities and needs discussed during the workshop to SDSN TReNDS experts from across the academic, policy, scientific, development, and industry disciplines.
  • At the global level, we will also work to identify and support the curation of global timely measures on sustainable development, which can serve a global public good, with key partners such as UNEP, Global Forest Watch and many more.

For more information on Data For Now or to get involved, click here or email TReNDS Manager, Maryam.Rabiee@unsdsn.org.