SDG Data Challenges: A Cross-Indicator Perspective

Embedded in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a desire to measure and monitor action taken by states to “improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growls – all while tacking climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.” Making state action both commensurable and internationally comparable, each of the 17 Global Goals are broken down into targets and subsets of indicators, thereby putting in place a globally shared system for tracking progress. Though not its primary objective, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has set in motion the internationalization of the data revolution. However, as already evidenced in pilot projects initiated by the UN Statistics Division, the Our World in Data’s SDG Tracker, Voluntary National Reviews, policy briefs by SDG custodian agencies, and elsewhere, many states lack the necessary statistical capacity required in order to effectively collect SDG-related data. This roundtable attempts to take stock of these data gaps and assess how they are being overcome, either by encouraging statistical capacity building or turning to alternative data sources such as citizen-generated data or big data. By assessing data obstacles and developments across policy fields, this roundtable seeks to provide a holistic, cross-indicator perspective of data-driven measurement governance in the case of the 2030 SDGs.