Article by Dilek Fraisl et al: “The termination in February 2025 of the Demographic and Health Surveys, a critical source of data on population, health, HIV, and nutrition in over 90 countries, supported by the United States Agency for International Development, constitutes a crisis for official statistics. This is particularly true for low- and middle-income countries that lack their own survey infrastructure1. At a national level, in the United States, proposed cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency by the current administration further threaten the capacity to monitor and achieve environmental sustainability and implement the SDGs2,3. Citizen science—data collected through voluntary public contributions—now can and must step up to fill the gap and play a more central role in official statistics.
Demographic and Health Surveys contribute directly to the calculation of around 30 of the indicators that underpin the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)4. More generally, a third of SDG indicators rely on household surveys data5.
Recent political changes, particularly in the United States, have exposed the risks of relying too heavily on a single country or institution to run global surveys and placing minimal responsibility on individual countries for their own data collection.
Many high-income countries, particularly European ones, are experiencing similar challenges and financial pressures on their statistical systems as their national budgets are increasingly prioritizing defense spending6. Along with these budget cuts comes a risk that perceived efficiency gains from artificial intelligence are increasingly viewed as a pretense to put further budgetary pressure on official statistical agencies7.
In this evolving environment, we argue that citizen science can become an essential part of national data gathering efforts. To date, policymakers, researchers, and agencies have viewed it as supplementary to official statistics. Although self-selected participation can introduce bias, citizen science provides fine-scale, timely, cost-efficient, and flexible data that can fill gaps and help validate official statistics. We contend that, rather than an optional complement, citizen science data should be systematically integrated into national and global data ecosystems…(More)”.
