Building a Demand-Driven Approach to the Data
Revolution for Sustainable Development
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and
the related implementation and monitoring agenda
that governments are starting to address, have
increased awareness of the huge demands for
data, both to provide the raw material for the
monitoring framework and also as an essential
part of the infrastructure for delivering the
goals. The expectations of governments are high
and rising. Running an effective health or
education service, understanding how to raise
agricultural productivity or how to incentivise
investment in new industries all require huge
amounts of data for governments and other
stakeholders to make effective decisions and
implement good policy.
In response
to both the increase in the demand for data and
to new opportunities on the supply side, the
Global Partnership for Sustainable Development
Data (GPSDD) was launched during the United
Nations General Assembly in September 2015 to
support countries around the world and
stakeholders across sectors to better harness
the data revolution to achieve the SDGs.
10.1 Introduction
One of the most critical conditions
for the realisation of the ambitions expressed in
the Agenda 2030 will be the more effective and
efficient use of dynamic and disaggregated data
for improved decision-making, service delivery,
citizen empowerment, entrepreneurship,
competitiveness and innovation to help achieve and
monitor the SDGs and their targets.
This increase in demand has come
together with a huge increase in supply, driven by
new technologies and the new methods that are now
possible. There is a transformative ‘data
revolution’ underway, by means of which “… 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” (A World that Counts, 2014,
p.2).
The creation of a partnership
like GPSDD had been a recommendation of two
reports (High-Level Panel on the Post-2015
Development Agenda and the Inter-Agency and Expert
Group on SDG Indicators) produced under the
auspices of the UN Secretary General during the
post-2015 development process, which was then
taken up by a number of governments, companies and
civil society organisations to get the partnership
launched in 2015. The GPSDD now has over 250
members including vanguard governments,
international agencies, private sector companies,
civil society groups, and statistics and data
communities from all corners of the world,
spanning sectors and disciplines.
The Global Partnership exists to connect
different stakeholders working on data, to
catalyse ideas and innovations that generate
progress and solve problems, and to drive the
political changes that are needed if data is to
play its role as a key part of the
infrastructure for sustainable development.
10.2 Data roadmaps for sustainable
development
At the national level, a central
pillar of the GPSDD’s strategy is to work with
governments and other organisations to support
their priorities for investments and innovations
in data. The GPSDD does this by engaging with
them in ‘data roadmap processes’ that are
country-led and take a whole-of-government and
multi-stakeholder approach (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The Data Roadmap for Sustainable
Development Forum held in Accra, Ghana in
April 2017.
Accordingly, the data roadmap, in
the current context, can be defined more as a
process bringing stakeholders together at the
country level to make progress against the SDGs,
as opposed to a specific document outlining the
path forward. While this is the intent of the
process, using a multi-stakeholder approach to
drive a strategic process that leads to clear
actions over a defined timeframe, countries have
used this process to organize, define
priorities, connect with relevant partners, and
better understand what is happening at the
country level. In addition, the data roadmap
process as defined by the GPSDD is meant to
complement and align to other national
development strategies including the National
Strategy for Development of Statistics.
Countries engaged as part of the data roadmaps
process in 2016–2017 include Colombia,
Philippines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Kenya,
Tanzania, USA and Ghana.
The GPSDD
operates at three main levels:
1)
putting data on the political agenda;
2) creating mechanisms to better
connect demand with supply; and
3)
creating an enabling environment to lessen the
friction for data flows.
With these
objectives in mind, the data roadmap process is
very demand focused. It allows for the better
understanding of how countries are addressing
the SDGs in relation to their national
development priorities; key issues and
challenges around data and technology (Figure
2); and how alternative sources of data and new
methods in the context of the data revolution
can be applied to meet these challenges.
Figure 2: Data gaps assessment matrix for the
SDG Indicators developed by DANE for Colombia
in 2016.
10.3 Country needs – geospatial and EO
data
At the country level, the GPSDD has
been working primarily with the National
Statistical Offices (NSOs), Presidential Offices,
Ministries of Planning and Finance, and
institutions focused on the rights to information
access as the main focal points through which
other government institutions and stakeholders
across sectors are brought into the process. A
number of consistent challenges have been
identified, including financing and capacity,
interoperability, data-sharing mechanisms,
engagement with the private sector, data literacy,
and a number of others that will be outlined in a
forthcoming report from the GPSDD assessing the
data roadmaps process thus far. Of these, issues
around data disaggregation, gaps on environmental
data, and the use of geospatial and Earth
observations (EO) have been identified as major
issues that will be addressed by the GPSDD through
multi-stakeholder collaborations (Figure 3). In
addition, the GPSDD has been assembling a
‘Data4SDGs Toolbox’ that makes available a number
of resources that speak to best practices,
guidelines and tools that address many of the
common challenges countries are facing within the
context of the data revolution.
In
early 2017, the GPSDD started working closely with
NASA and the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) to
more specifically address how EO and in-situ data
could be applied to data gaps that countries are
facing. Many of these are within the broader
environmental domain and many of the targets and
related indicators are classified as Tier II or
III. With the support of NASA, GEO and other
organizations including the University of
Maryland, CEOS, ESA, CIESIN and University of
South Florida, the GPSDD has been working
iteratively to identify the need at the country
level and match this need with available or
developing methods from partner organizations in a
way where these methods can be tested and scaled
across countries (Figure 3). The United Nations
Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial
Information Management (UN-GGIM) is spearheading
the process to better integrate geospatial methods
with national statistics, something that this work
at the country level is only further encouraging
and aligning to.
For example, in
Colombia, the GPSDD worked closely with NASA and
the National Administrative Department of
Statistics (DANE) to develop a workshop in March
2017, bringing together key institutions to
address how EO data could be applied to generate
and/or complement environmental information. The
workshop included the Ministry of Environment and
Sustainable Development (MADS) and the Institute
of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental
Studies (IDEAM), both of which had relevant
expertise within this domain. Key SDG Goals
identified as challenges included Goal 6 – Clean
water and sanitation; Goal 11 – Sustainable cities
and communities; and Goal 15 – Life on land.
Figure 3: Canopy cover of trees in Colombia
>5m in height - Matt Hansen, University of
Maryland.
With the help of all of the above
institutions, a number of methods were identified
that were applicable to strengthen the work
already being done in the country, as well as new
opportunities to address the needs of Colombia
through partner organizations. More importantly,
this process also supported the strengthening of
institutional ties between the Colombian
institutions regarding the dissemination on
methods under development and promoting access to
a Data Cube already under development at IDEAM
with the support of CEOS, NASA and others, from
open source code made available by Geoscience
Australia and CSIRO. This process provided a great
example of both national level and international
collaboration, including making innovation more
openly accessible.
10.4 Encouraging a data ecosystem approach
At the core of the work with country
partners is the advancement of mechanisms for how
governments, civil society, private sector and other
actors including international organizations,
foundations and academia work with one another to
achieve the SDGs. It will take more coordination and
cooperation across these sectors to fill the data
and technology gaps, including the capacity and
resources required. There are still fundamental
issues when considering the elements needed to
encourage a data ecosystem approach, including data
sharing and federated approaches at the government
level, and the integration of open data and the SDGs
to build a more thriving environment that brings in
the private sector and civil society as active
participants and users of data. Conversely, both the
private sector and civil society have valuable data
in support of the SDGs that also needs to be made
more accessible. For example, efforts are on-going
for how mobile data, specifically call data records,
can be applied for social good and the SDGs.
However, there are many regulatory, privacy and
functional models that still need to be developed
and tested before this becomes more mainstream.
Organizations like GSMA, DIAL, Orange, Dalberg Data
Insights, MIT and many others are working on these
issues. In the end: an ecosystem approach where the
right policies are in place to encourage data
sharing and open data; an infrastructure in place
that creates a distributed network; and users across
sectors that have access to use and innovate against
these data developing a new market for social good
is the ideal. The SDGs need a framework that
supports the reporting and monitoring requirements,
while also applying data for action, decision-making
and entrepreneurship.
10.5 API Highways
An early activity the GPSDD was involved
in was to address the interoperability issues that
limit access and use of data. A ‘Data Architectures’
Working Group was formulated in early 2016 that
initially focused on the differences between
platforms, rather than an infrastructure that
supports the data needs of these platforms. As a
result, and based on further feedback from Working
Group members, the GPSDD Secretariat experimented
with developing a data infrastructure that sought to
identify high-value, alternative datasets
(geospatial, EO, open data, citizen-generated-data,
mobile data) made available via API Highways that
could easily be consumed by other applications and
platforms (Figure 4). This includes a playbook or
key considerations for developing data services.
The intent was to provide an additional
“channel” for SDG-relevant data that could be
networked with other data infrastructures and
platforms, bringing together both official and
non-official data that would further empower the
developer ecosystem to create rich apps and
visualizations for action and decision-making.
Working with GEO, the GPSDD is also testing this
infrastructure to make methods and EO data more
accessible and thus scalable across countries. For
example, GEO, NASA and others are working with UN
Environment on the methodology for calculating
Indicator 6.6.1 – change in the extent of
water-related ecosystems over time. The GPSDD is
working with GEO to create a connector from API
Highways to its data repository such that the data
needed for this indicator can be ‘packaged’, along
with the methods where API Highways can be used as
an additional channel to scale the application of
this method.
10.6 Conclusion
Over the next 3 years, many countries
will be undergoing their national censuses both for
population and agriculture. While maintaining the
need for household level surveys, there are
consistent needs for using alternative methods to
make these censuses and sectorial information more
dynamic, cost-effective and granular, something
where geospatial and EO data have a large role. When
coupled with citizen-generated data, mobile data and
survey level data, there is immense potential for
how these data not only inform national planning,
but also citizen-level decision-making.
Figure 4: An example of bringing data
together via API Highways to visualize where
conflict is occurring in relation to protected
areas.
Article Contributors
Aditya Agrawal (Director, Data Ecosystems Team,
Global Partnership for Sustainable Development
Data)
