The Data Revolution for Sustainable Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeffrey D. Sachs at Project Syndicate: “There is growing recognition that the success of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will be adopted on September 25 at a special United Nations summit, will depend on the ability of governments, businesses, and civil society to harness data for decision-making…

One way to improve data collection and use for sustainable development is to create an active link between the provision of services and the collection and processing of data for decision-making. Take health-care services. Every day, in remote villages of developing countries, community health workers help patients fight diseases (such as malaria), get to clinics for checkups, receive vital immunizations, obtain diagnoses (through telemedicine), and access emergency aid for their infants and young children (such as for chronic under-nutrition). But the information from such visits is usually not collected, and even if it is put on paper, it is never used again.
We now have a much smarter way to proceed. Community health workers are increasingly supported by smart-phone applications, which they can use to log patient information at each visit. That information can go directly onto public-health dashboards, which health managers can use to spot disease outbreaks, failures in supply chains, or the need to bolster technical staff. Such systems can provide a real-time log of vital events, including births and deaths, and even use so-called verbal autopsies to help identify causes of death. And, as part of electronic medical records, the information can be used at future visits to the doctor or to remind patients of the need for follow-up visits or medical interventions….
Fortunately, the information and communications technology revolution and the spread of broadband coverage nearly everywhere can quickly make such time lags a thing of the past. As indicated in the report A World that Counts: Mobilizing the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, we must modernize the practices used by statistical offices and other public agencies, while tapping into new sources of data in a thoughtful and creative way that complements traditional approaches.
Through more effective use of smart data – collected during service delivery, economic transactions, and remote sensing – the fight against extreme poverty will be bolstered; the global energy system will be made much more efficient and less polluting; and vital services such as health and education will be made far more effective and accessible.
With this breakthrough in sight, several governments, including that of the United States, as well as businesses and other partners, have announced plans to launch a new “Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data” at the UN this month. The new partnership aims to strengthen data collection and monitoring efforts by raising more funds, encouraging knowledge-sharing, addressing key barriers to access and use of data, and identifying new big-data strategies to upgrade the world’s statistical systems.
The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network will support the new Global Partnership by creating a new Thematic Network on Data for Sustainable Development, which will bring together leading data scientists, thinkers, and academics from across multiple sectors and disciplines to form a center of data excellence….(More)”

Accur8Africa

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“Accur8Africa aims to be the leading platform supporting the accuracy of data in the continent. If we intend to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the next fifteen years, accurate data remains a non-negotiable necessity. Accur8Africa recognizes that nothing less than a data revolution is required. To achieve this we are building the statistical capacity of institutions across Africa and encouraging the use of data-driven decisions alongside better development metrics for key sectors such as gender equality, climate change, equity and social inclusion and health.

Africa has data in abundance but it exists in a fragmented and disorganized manner. As a result, the achievements of the Millennium Development Goals will be largely unquantifiable. As we transition from the MDG’s to the Sustainable Development Goals, and national governments meet to discuss the 17 goals that could transform the world by 2030, we believe that the African Continent deserves better and more accurate data…..Africa has a great role to play in the next fifteen years. The United Nations development agenda has generated momentum for a worldwide “data revolution,” shining a much-needed light on the need for better development data in Africa and elsewhere. Governments, international institutions, and donors need accurate data on basic development metrics such as inflation, vaccination coverage, and school enrolment in order to accurately plan, budget, and evaluate their activities. Governments, citizens, and civil society can then use this data as a “currency” for accountability. When statistical systems function properly, good-quality data are exchanged freely amongst all stakeholders ensuring that funding and development efforts are producing the desired results….(More)”

The Open Seventeen

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“Crowdsourcing the Verification of the Sustainable Development Goals with Open Data : In 2015, the United Nations is announcing seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the world. Success at implementing the SDGs by 2030 could put the planet on the right course for the rest of the century. Failure could result in a breakdown of trust in global initiatives and cynical pursuit of self-interest by nations and corporations.

One way to ensure SDGs are achieved is to establish an independent means for verifying that all stakeholders – governments, corporations, NGOs and international organisations – live up to their promises. This requires harnessing the grassroots efforts of concerned citizens on a global scale.

To ignite this effort, ONE– in collaboration with the Citizen Cyberscience Centre and the Crowdcrafting platform for open research – is launching The Open Seventeen, a challenge to develop crowdsourcing projects that tackle SDGs using open data.

How does this challenge work?

You’ll find a big blue button further down this page. Use this to pitch a crowdsourcing project that tackles any of the 17 SDGs, at either a local, regional or global level, and tell us what open data set could be analysed for this purpose.

To inspire you, we’ve provided below some >examples of crowdsourcing projects that have already been tackling different aspects of the SDGs, from deforestation to corruption, and from drought to disease. Projects proposed for the challenge should have clear and realistic goals, and build on existing open data sets.

ONE and its partners will select three proposals and create crowdsourcing projects based on these. The winners and their projects will be profiled by ONE in upcoming international events related to the launch of the SDGs. Your project could inspire the world….

What can you do with open data to help verify SDGs? Have a look at what citizens have already created using the open source technology PyBossa that powers the Crowdcrafting platform and other crowdsourcing projects….(More)”

Data for Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeffrey D. Sachs at Project Syndicate: “The data revolution is rapidly transforming every part of society. Elections are managed with biometrics, forests are monitored by satellite imagery, banking has migrated from branch offices to smartphones, and medical x-rays are examined halfway around the world. With a bit of investment and foresight, spelled out in a new report, prepared by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), on Data for Development, the data revolution can drive a sustainable development revolution, and accelerate progress toward ending poverty, promoting social inclusion, and protecting the environment.
The world’s governments will adopt the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at a special United Nations summit on September 25. The occasion will likely be the largest gathering of world leaders in history, as some 170 heads of state and government adopt shared goals that will guide global development efforts until 2030. Of course, goals are easier to adopt than to achieve. So we will need new tools, including new data systems, to turn the SDGs into reality by 2030. In developing these new data systems, governments, businesses, and civil-society groups should promote four distinct purposes.

The first, and most important, is data for service delivery. The data revolution gives governments and businesses new and greatly improved ways to deliver services, fight corruption, cut red tape, and guarantee access in previously isolated places. Information technology is already revolutionizing the delivery of health care, education, governance, infrastructure (for example, prepaid electricity), banking, emergency response, and much more.
The second purpose is data for public management. Officials can now maintain real-time dashboards informing them of the current state of government facilities, transport networks, emergency relief operations, public health surveillance, violent crimes, and much more. Citizen feedback can also improve functioning, such as by crowd-sourcing traffic information from drivers. Geographic information systems (GIS) allow for real-time monitoring across local governments and districts in far-flung regions.
The third purpose is data for accountability of governments and businesses. It is a truism that government bureaucracies cut corners, hide gaps in service delivery, exaggerate performance, or, in the worst cases, simply steal when they can get away with it. Many businesses are no better. The data revolution can help to ensure that verifiable data are accessible to the general public and the intended recipients of public and private services. When services do not arrive on schedule (owing to, say, a bottleneck in construction or corruption in the supply chain), the data system will enable the public to pinpoint problems and hold governments and businesses to account.
Finally, the data revolution should enable the public to know whether or not a global goal or target has actually been achieved. The Millennium Development Goals, which were set in the year 2000, established quantitative targets for the year 2015. But, although we are now in the MDGs’ final year, we still lack precise knowledge of whether certain MDG targets have been achieved, owing to the absence of high-quality, timely data. Some of the most important MDG targets are reported with a lag of several years. The World Bank, for example, has not published detailed poverty data since 2010…..(More)”

Five Headlines from a Big Month for the Data Revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah T. Lucas at Post2015.org: “If the history of the data revolution were written today, it would include three major dates. May 2013, when theHigh Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda first coined the phrase “data revolution.” November 2014, when the UN Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group (IEAG) set a vision for it. And April 2015, when five headliner stories pushed the data revolution from great idea to a concrete roadmap for action.

The April 2015 Data Revolution Headlines

1. The African Data Consensus puts Africa in the lead on bringing the data revolution to the regional level. TheAfrica Data Consensus (ADC) envisions “a profound shift in the way that data is harnessed to impact on development decision-making, with a particular emphasis on building a culture of usage.” The ADC finds consensus across 15 “data communities”—ranging from open data to official statistics to geospatial data, and is endorsed by Africa’s ministers of finance. The ADC gets top billing in my book, as the first contribution that truly reflects a large diversity of voices and creates a political hook for action. (Stay tuned for a blog from my colleague Rachel Quint on the ADC).

2. The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) gets our minds (and wallets) around the data needed to measure the SDGs. The SDSN Needs Assessment for SDG Monitoring and Statistical Capacity Development maps the investments needed to improve official statistics. My favorite parts are the clear typology of data (see pg. 12), and that the authors are very open about the methods, assumptions, and leaps of faith they had to take in the costing exercise. They also start an important discussion about how advances in information and communications technology, satellite imagery, and other new technologies have the potential to expand coverage, increase analytic capacity, and reduce the cost of data systems.

3. The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) calls on us to find the “missing millions.” ODI’s The Data Revolution: Finding the Missing Millions presents the stark reality of data gaps and what they mean for understanding and addressing development challenges. The authors highlight that even that most fundamental of measures—of poverty levels—could be understated by as much as a quarter. And that’s just the beginning. The report also pushes us to think beyond the costs of data, and focus on how much good data can save. With examples of data lowering the cost of doing government business, the authors remind us to think about data as an investment with real economic and social returns.

4. Paris21 offers a roadmap for putting national statistic offices (NSOs) at the heart of the data revolution.Paris21’s Roadmap for a Country-Led Data Revolution does not mince words. It calls on the data revolution to “turn a vicious cycle of [NSO] underperformance and inadequate resources into a virtuous one where increased demand leads to improved performance and an increase in resources and capacity.” It makes the case for why NSOs are central and need more support, while also pushing them to modernize, innovate, and open up. The roadmap gets my vote for best design. This ain’t your grandfather’s statistics report!

5. The Cartagena Data Festival features real-live data heroes and fosters new partnerships. The Festival featured data innovators (such as terra-i using satellite data to track deforestation), NSOs on the leading edge of modernization and reform (such as Colombia and the Philippines), traditional actors using old data in new ways (such as the Inter-American Development Bank’s fantastic energy database), groups focused on citizen-generated data (such as The Data Shift and UN My World), private firms working with big data for social good (such asTelefónica), and many others—all reminding us that the data revolution is well underway and will not be stopped. Most importantly, it brought these actors together in one place. You could see the sparks flying as folks learned from each other and hatched plans together. The Festival gets my vote for best conference of a lifetime, with the perfect blend of substantive sessions, intense debate, learning, inspiration, new connections, and a lot of fun. (Stay tuned for a post from my colleague Kristen Stelljes and me for more on Cartagena).

This month full of headlines leaves no room for doubt—momentum is building fast on the data revolution. And just in time.

With the Financing for Development (FFD) conference in Addis Ababa in July, the agreement of Sustainable Development Goals in New York in September, and the Climate Summit in Paris in December, this is a big political year for global development. Data revolutionaries must seize this moment to push past vision, past roadmaps, to actual action and results…..(More)”

The road to better data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Johannes Jütting at OECDInsights: Tradition tells us that more than 3,000 years ago, Moses went to the top of Mount Sinai and came back down with 10 commandments. When the world’s presidents and prime ministers go to the top of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) mountain in New York late this summer they will come down with not 10 commandments but 169. Too many?

Some people certainly think so. “Stupid development goals,” The Economist said recently. It argued that the 17 SDGs and roughly 169 targets should “honour Moses and be pruned to ten goals”. Others disagree. In a report for the Overseas Development Institute, May Miller-Dawkins, warned of the dangers of letting practicality “blunt ambition”. She backed SDGs with “high ambition”.

The debate over the “right” number of goals and targets is interesting, important even. But it misses a key point: No matter how many goals and targets are finally agreed, if we can’t measure their real impact on people’s lives, on our societies and on the environment, then they risk becoming irrelevant.

Unfortunately, we already know that many developing countries have problems compiling even basic social and economic statistics, never mind the complex web of data that will be needed to monitor the SDGs. A few examples: In 2013, about 35% of all live births were not officially registered worldwide, rising to two-thirds in developing countries. In Africa, just seven countries have data on their total number of landholders and women landholders, and none have data from before 2004. Last but not least, fast-changing economies and associated measurement challenges mean we are not sure today if we have worldwide a billion people living in extreme poverty, half a billion or more than a billion.

Why does this matter? Without adequate data, we cannot identify the problems that planning and policymaking need to address. We also cannot judge if governments and others are meeting their commitments. As a report from the Centre for Global Development notes, “Data […] serve as a ‘currency’ for accountability among and within governments, citizens, and civil society at large, and they can be used to hold development agencies accountable.”…(More)”

Data-Driven Development Pathways for Progress

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Report from the World Economic Forum: “Data is the lifeblood of sustainable development and holds tremendous potential for transformative positive change particularly for lower- and middle-income countries. Yet despite the promise of a “Data Revolution”, progress is not a certainty. Lack of clarity on privacy and ethical issues, asymmetric power dynamics and an array of entangled societal and commercial risks threaten to hinder progress.
Written by the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Data-Driven Development, this report serves to clarify how big data can be leveraged to address the challenges of sustainable development. Providing a blueprint for balancing competing tensions, areas of focus include: addressing the data deficit of the Global South, establishing resilient governance and strengthening capacities at the community and individual level. (PDF)”

The problem with the data revolution in four Venn diagrams

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Morten Jerven in The Guardian: “In August, UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon named his independent expert advisory group, 24 experts tasked with providing recommendations on how best to use data to deliver the sustainable development goals….On 6 November, those recommendations were published in a report entitled A world that counts, a cleverly crafted motivational manifesto, but by no means a practical roadmap on how to apply a “data revolution” to the future development agenda.
I have previously written about this in more detail, but essentially, the report’s key weakness is that it conflates several terms, and assumes automatic relationships between things such as “counting” and “knowing”.
Using four Venn diagrams, I’ve tried to illustrate some of the main misconceptions.

Not everything that counts can be counted

venn 1
Image 1

The report strongly suggests that everything that matters can be counted. We know that this is not true. If the guiding principle for the sustainable development goals is to make decisions as if everything can be counted, the end result will be very misleading.

Data is not the same as statistics

venn 2
Image 2

The “data revolution” hype is just one of many places where the difference between statistics and data is misunderstood. Data is not the same as numbers. Data literally mean ‘what is given’, so when we speak of data we are talking about observations – quantitative or qualitative, or even figurative – that can be used to get information.
To keep talking about data when we mean statistics may sound better, but it only leads to confusion. The report (pdf) calls on the UN to establish “a process whereby key stakeholders create a Global Consensus on Data”. What is that supposed to mean? That statement is meaningless if you exchange the word “data” with “observations”, “knowledge” or ‘evidence’. It can, however, make sense if you talk about “statistics”.
International organisations do have a natural role when it comes to developing global standards for official statistics. Reaching a global consensus on how observations and evidence constitute knowledge is futile.

More data does not mean better decisions…

There are other methods to knowing than through counting…(More)”

 

Stories of Innovative Democracy at Local Level

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Special Issue of Field Actions Science Reports published in partnership with CIVICUS, coordinated by Dorothée Guénéheux, Clara Bosco, Agnès Chamayou and Henri Rouillé d’Orfeuil: “This special issue presents many and varied field actions, such as the promotion of the rights of young people, the resolution of the conflicts of agropastoral activities, or the process of participatory decisionmaking on community budgetary allocations, among many others. It addresses projects developed all over the world, on five continents, and covering both the northern and southern hemispheres. The legitimate initial queries and doubts that assailed those who started this publication as regards its feasibility, have been swept away by the enthusiasm and the large number of papers that have been sent in….”

 

A World That Counts: Mobilising a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development

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Executive Summary of the Report by the UN Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development (IEAG): “Data are the lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability. Without high-quality data providing the right information on the right things at the right time; designing, monitoring and evaluating effective policies becomes almost impossible.
New technologies are leading to an exponential increase in the volume and types of data available, creating unprecedented possibilities for informing and transforming society and protecting the environment. Governments, companies, researchers and citizen groups are in a ferment of experimentation, innovation and adaptation to the new world of data, a world in which data are bigger, faster and more detailed than ever before. This is the data revolution.
Some are already living in this new world. But too many people, organisations and governments are excluded because of lack of resources, knowledge, capacity or opportunity. There are huge and growing inequalities in access to data and information and in the ability to use it.
Data needs improving. Despite considerable progress in recent years, whole groups of people are not being counted and important aspects of people’s lives and environmental conditions are still not measured. For people, this can lead to the denial of basic rights, and for the planet, to continued environmental degradation. Too often, existing data remain unused because they are released too late or not at all, not well-documented and harmonized, or not available at the level of detail needed for decision-making.
As the world embarks on an ambitious project to meet new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is an urgent need to mobilise the data revolution for all people and the whole planet in order to monitor progress, hold governments accountable and foster sustainable development. More diverse, integrated, timely and trustworthy information can lead to better decision-making and real-time citizen feedback. This in turn enables individuals, public and private institutions, and companies to make choices that are good for them and for the world they live in.
This report sets out the main opportunities and risks presented by the data revolution for sustain-able development. Seizing these opportunities and mitigating these risks requires active choices, especially by governments and international institutions. Without immediate action, gaps between developed and developing countries, between information-rich and information-poor people, and between the private and public sectors will widen, and risks of harm and abuses of human rights will grow.

An urgent call for action: Key recommendations

The strong leadership of the United Nations (UN) is vital for the success of this process. The Independent Expert Advisory Group (IEAG), established in August 2014, offers the UN Secretary-General several key recommendations for actions to be taken in the near future, summarised below:

  1. Develop a global consensus on principles and standards: The disparate worlds of public, private and civil society data and statistics providers need to be urgently brought together to build trust and confidence among data users. We propose that the UN establish a process whereby key stakeholders create a “Global Consensus on Data”, to adopt principles concerning legal, technical, privacy, geospatial and statistical standards which, among other things, will facilitate openness and information exchange and promote and protect human rights.
  2. Share technology and innovations for the common good: To create mechanisms through which technology and innovation can be shared and used for the common good, we propose
    to create a global “Network of Data Innovation Networks”, to bring together the organisations and experts in the field. This would: contribute to the adoption of best practices for improving the monitoring of SDGs, identify areas where common data-related infrastructures could address capacity problems and improve efficiency, encourage collaborations, identify critical research gaps and create incentives to innovate.
  3. New resources for capacity development: Improving data is a development agenda in
    its own right, and can improve the targeting of existing resources and spur new economic opportunities. Existing gaps can only be overcome through new investments and the strengthening of capacities. A new funding stream to support the data revolution for sustainable development should be endorsed at the “Third International Conference on Financing for Development”, in Addis Ababa in July 2015. An assessment will be needed of the scale of investments, capacity development and technology transfer that is required, especially for low income countries; and proposals developed for mechanisms to leverage the creativity and resources of the private sector. Funding will also be needed to implement an education program aimed at improving people’s, infomediaries’ and public servants’ capacity and data literacy to break down barriers between people and data.
  4. Leadership for coordination and mobilisation: A UN-led “Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data” is proposed, tomobiliseandcoordinate the actions and institutions required to make the data revolution serve sustainable development, promoting several initiatives, such as:
    • A “World Forum on Sustainable Development Data” to bring together the whole data ecosystem to share ideas and experiences for data improvements, innovation, advocacy and technology transfer. The first Forum should take place at the end of 2015, once the SDGs are agreed;
    • A “Global Users Forum for Data for SDGs”, to ensure feedback loops between data producers and users, help the international community to set priorities and assess results;
    • Brokering key global public-private partnerships for data sharing.
  5. Exploit some quick wins on SDG data: Establishing a “SDGs data lab” to support the development of a first wave of SDG indicators, developing an SDG analysis and visualisation platform using the most advanced tools and features for exploring data, and building a dashboard from diverse data sources on ”the state of the world”.

Never again should it be possible to say “we didn’t know”. No one should be invisible. This is the world we want – a world that counts.”