Summary
Highlights
- The Data For Now initiative aims to improve the timeliness, coverage, and quality of SDG data by filling critical data gaps through collaboration and partnership.
- Telecom companies can play a critical role in providing timely data for policy interventions in emergencies.
- The World Hunger Map portal developed by the World Food Programme (WFP) and Alibaba will make local data on food security available in near real-time.
- Data clocks are public art installations visualizing key SDG indicators to support a new movement of “factivism.”
Organized by the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and partners, this event launched the Data For Now Initiative, which aims to support collaboration and partnership for the sustainable use of robust methods and tools that improve the timeliness, coverage, and quality of SDG data.
Welcoming participants, Rajesh Mirchandani, Chief Communications Officer, UN Ford Foundation, said that “if we don’t count everybody” people die, ecosystems degrade, and climate change continues. Highlighting the Decade of Action and Delivery for Sustainable Development, adopted by the SDG Action Summit the previous day, he said Data For Now will bring together data practitioners and users to “do more with data.”
In her keynote, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed stressed that no country is on track to achieve the SDGs by 2030 and that different approaches are needed for several Goals. Noting that good data is only available for 20% of the SDG indicators, she underlined the importance of timely, disaggregated data for identifying and scaling up effective action and accelerating progress. She said the Data For Now partnership will build a community of data users to maximise the sharing and use of data. She called on countries and organizations to join the partnership and step up data resources to ensure that the people who are still waiting are recognized and counted for the SDGs.
Claire Melamed, CEO, Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, explained that progress requires access to the right data at the right time, noting that “we can’t navigate by looking in the rear-view mirror.” She said Data For Now will scale up existing tools and efforts to provide data on the world as it is now to improve action.
Pledges and Projects
In a series of short panels and presentations, speakers from national governments, international organizations, NGOs, and businesses showcased projects that will contribute to Data For Now.
Patricia Obo-Nai, CEO Vodafone Ghana, explained how Vodafone, in collaboration with the government, uses anonymized mobile phone data to track population trends and help making life-saving decisions. Noting the importance of data privacy, she called on data providers to come together to enable accurate, timely, and predictive decision-making that saves lives. Mats Granryd, Director General, Global System for Mobile Communication (GSMA), reiterated the challenge of bridging data ethics and data uses, underlining the potential of mobile data for decision making. Noting that big data saves lives, he encouraged companies to be bold and use their data for action. David Beasley, Executive Director, World Food Programme (WFP), and Eric Jing, Alibaba, presented the Hunger Map platform combining information from different sources to monitor and predict the global food security situation in near real-time. Beasley stressed that the platform will allow more efficient use of food aid as it enables identifying people in need at local scale.
Jamie Drummond, co-founder, ONE, presented a video on a project to create public “data clocks” showing changes in key indicators in real time. As public art installations, Data Clocks intend to create shared epistemologies between activists and decision makers to support a new movement of “factivism.”
Maximo Torrero, Assistant Director-General, Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), described FAO’s data lab, an initiative to improve the quality and comparability of data from official country sources. He said the lab is helping countries to assess existing data and data collection methods to learn how data can be collected and used more effectively.
Rebecca Moore, Director, Google Earth, explained how the Google Earth engine combines different streams of data in real-time to provide knowledge for decision making, such as monitoring the state of forests, visualizing changes in water bodies, or predicting locust outbreaks. She said Google Earth will soon make data cubes available than can be used in other applications.
Matthew Rycroft, Permanent Secretary of International Development, UK, provided examples of the work of the Global Data Center of the UK Department for International Development (DFID), including prediction of outbreaks of cholera to improve timely relief action. He said development agencies should focus on building the capacity of countries to enable them to work together on projects like the Hunger Map.
Experiences on the Ground
The final panel focused on experiences on the ground. Mahmoud Mohieldin, Senior Vice-President, World Bank Group, said the cost of data is often prohibitive, noting that making data publicly available can reduce the costs while improving data quality and usability. Commenting on the role of academia, Shaida Badiee, Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), highlighted SDSN’s role as independent voice and its commitment to work on the conditions that facilitate data sharing and the specifics of data curation.
Omar Seidu, Head of Demographics, Statistical Service, Ghana, told the story of a local community that succeeded in preventing a mining operation by using data that demonstrated operation’s destructive impacts. He described Ghana’s steps to speed up access to new data and explore alternative data sources.
Ariunzaya Ayush, Chairwoman, National Statistics Office, Mongolia, reported how improved access to data was used to prevent livestock deaths during a recent harsh winter. She added that national priorities include generating georeferenced data and investing in data literacy.
Iván Mauricio Ojeda, Director General, Statistics, Surveys and Censuses, Paraguay, described efforts to modernize Paraguay’s institutions and laws for statistics. He said Paraguay has aligned its national development strategy with the SDGs and mandated the Statistics Office to monitor progress.
In her closing statement, Vera Songwe, Executive Secretary, UN Economic Commission for Africa, highlighted the importance of high-frequency, up-to-date data for SDG implementation and the importance of making marginalized populations visible. She urged working together to move towards big data, noting that “we must find 250 million invisible women in Africa alone.”Mirchandani thanked participants and invited them to gather again at the World Data Forum in October 2020 in Bern Switzerland.
IISD Reporting Services, through its Earth Negotiations Bulletin on the Side (ENBOTS) meeting coverage, provided web coverage from the side event on Data for Now – Accelerating Progress Through Timely Data.
Photos courtesy of Diane Bondareff
