SDMX for Sustainable Development Goals Indicators: The Way Forward Abdulla Gozalov United Nations Statistics Division

Sustainable Development Goals From the United Nations General Assembly resolution 70/1 “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development“ 74. Follow-up and review processes at all levels will be guided by the following principles: … (g) They will be rigorous and based on evidence, informed by country-led evaluations and data which is high-quality, accessible, timely, reliable and disaggregated by income, sex, age, race, ethnicity, migration status, disability and geographic location and other characteristics relevant in national contexts.

SDMX-SDGs Working Group Working Group on SDMX for SDG Indicators established by IAEG-SDGs in April 2016 Composed of 12 countries, 10 international agencies Chaired by France UNSD acts as the Secretariat First meeting in October 2016 Monthly virtual, annual physical meetings

SDMX-SDGs: Objectives Develop global Data Structure Definition(s) and Metadata Structure Definition(s) for SDG Indicators Standards for the packaging of SDGs data and metadata including concepts, codes, structures Develop, pilot, and establish data exchange mechanisms for SDG indicators Reporting and dissemination at national, regional, global level

Challenges Highly disaggregated dataset mandated by the General Assembly Methodology under development for many of the indicators and breakdowns SDMX solution must be customizable for dissemination by countries

Opportunities Uniform data model Read and correctly interpret SDGs data from any source: national, regional, global Uniform data access and dissemination SDMX-based Application Programming Interface (API): JSON, XML, CSV Greatly reduced reporting burden Common tools, visualizations, platforms…

SDMX-SDGs: Timeline Draft DSD(s): first draft Feb 2018 Pilot data exchange: completed in Sep 2018 With participation of about 5 countries and 5 custodian agencies Official DSD: released Jun 2019 Metadata exchange to be piloted from late 2019

SDG datasets Global dataset compiled and published by UNSD Annual reporting Internationally comparable country-level data Regional and global aggregates Regional datasets compiled by regional agencies Customized regional indicator sets Indicators may be comparable at regional or global level National datasets compiled by the countries Voluntary reporting of indicator set customized based on the country’s priorities Indicators do not necessarily follow global methodology Emphasis on subnational data

National and International Data National and international data and metadata will be compared and analyzed at the global SDG Platform Greatly simplified by SDMX Reasons for differences: see metadata! Data exchange with 20 countries funded through the UNSD-DFID Project on SDG Monitoring Additional capacity building for SDMX exchange through the DA-10 and other projects

What does it take to implement SDMX exchange? Available no-cost tools greatly simplify the implementation Adaptable to various scenarios Existing database Migration to a new database No database

What then? Establish data exchange with the global SDG platform Comparison between national and global indicators Dissemination platforms and other tools with support for SDMX Greatly reduced cost of implementation

THANK YOU Abdulla Gozalov Email: gozalov un.org http://unstats.un.org/sdgs/