An UNGA Data Snapshot: Data Financing, Digital Transformation, and Data Use Take Center Stage
By Alyson Marks
Photo from ORF
This week marked the official end of the 77th UN General Assembly (UNGA), where leaders from across the globe convened in New York to confront the world’s biggest challenges, including the war in Ukraine, global supply chain and economic issues, rising interest rates and debt levels, climate change, and ending the COVID-19 pandemic. We provide a high-level snapshot of the data-related highlights from the week below.
Noteworthy Events and Announcements
The Future of Digital Cooperation – Digital public infrastructure (DPI) plays a critical role in delivering essential services for vulnerable populations and provides the technical foundation for data sharing and use, which are essential for collaborative decision-making. To highlight commitments to the DPI agenda across a range of development actors, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) sponsored an event featuring a number of high-level stakeholders, including Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway’s Prime Minister, Bill Gates, Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, David Malpass, President of the World Bank, among many others.
Unlocking Impact: Data For A Purpose – The event brought together high-level leaders from across the public and private sectors, including the UN Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed, and Mari Pangestu, World Bank Managing Director of Development Policy and Partnerships, to advocate for more data-driven solutions to address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), discuss how countries can leverage data for greater impact, and strengthen the business case for investing in data (new research was highlighted demonstrating that every dollar invested in data systems creates an average of $32 USD in economic benefits).
Data Values Campaign – The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data released their Data Values Manifesto and new campaign to build a movement to “create a fair data future for all,” and to ensure more inclusive data. The campaign includes a program that will provide training, funding, and support to six individuals working at the grassroots level to become Data Values Advocates. Advocates will co-develop a year-long work plan for the program, running through November 2023.
Accelerating Data Science and AI Across Africa – In partnership with the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the software company, NVIDIA, announced a new initiative to support developer communities in ten African nations with data science training and technology to advance evidence-informed policymaking and resource allocation.
New Reports on Data Use, Digital Transformation, and SDG Progress
Overcoming Data Graveyards – While billions of gigabytes of data are produced daily, far too often unused data pass into a “data graveyard” (Custer et al, 2017) – where they go unutilized, precluding evidence-informed decisions from being made. To help address this issue, SDSN TReNDS and Open Data Watch released a new report that aims to demystify the institutional barriers and the challenges of improving data use for official statistics and outlines a way forward for research by sourcing best practices from countries through a survey and in-depth interviews.
Tracking Progress on Food and Agriculture-Related Indicators – The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) published an assessment on select SDG indicators that have implications for food and agriculture across eight SDGs, and the results are bleak, in a large part due to the war in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change. Their data reveals that an additional 75 – 95 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty, globally food loss estimates have remained steady, and in 29 out of the 36 countries with available data, the share of women with ownership over agricultural land is significantly lower than that of men.
Goalkeepers Report – The Gates Foundation’s annual Goalkeepers Report explores the progress made on the SDGs, with this year’s report spotlighting two key areas: food security and gender equality. While the report made clear that we are far off track for achieving any of the goals, it offered a glimmer of hope – underscoring that what’s not reflected in the numbers and data [on SDG progress] is “the potential for human ingenuity” and innovation.
G7P Accountability Report – On the heels of the UNDP and the DPGA’s high-level event on accelerating inclusive digital public infrastructure and the Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers report in which Melinda Gates argued for greater digital financial inclusion, SDSN TReNDS released its annual ‘Accountability Report,’ spotlighting the progress of the G7 Partnership for Women’s Digital Financial Inclusion in Africa and providing recommendations for how to strengthen the Partnership’s collective impact in the years ahead.
Despite the somber picture of the world highlighted by the UN Secretary-General in his opening address at the assembly, we are encouraged by the data community’s efforts to expedite data financing and the potential for digital public infrastructure to accelerate progress.