2.12 Sustainable development indicators#
In 2017, the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including a global indicator framework for monitoring progress, informing policy, and ensuring all stakeholders’ accountability. There are currently 231 unique indicators in the framework. The Inter-Agency Expert Group on SDG indicators has classified these into three classes as follows:
Tier 1: Indicator is conceptually clear, has an internationally established methodology and standards are available, and data are regularly produced by countries for at least 50 per cent of countries and of the population in every region where the indicator is relevant. At mid-2020, 123 indicators (53% of the total number) were classified at tier 1.
Tier 2: Indicator is conceptually clear, has an internationally established methodology and standards are available, but data are not regularly produced by countries. At mid-2020, 106 indicators (46% of the total number) were classified at tier 2.
Tier 3: No internationally established methodology or standards are yet available for the indicator, but methodology/standards are being (or will be) developed or tested. At mid-2020, two indicators were classified at tier 3.
As discussed in the Sustainable Development Goal Report 2020, good progress has been made in recent years in increasing the availability of internationally comparable data for SDG monitoring. However, substantial data gaps still exist in terms of required geographic coverage, timeliness, and disaggregation level. Moreover, challenges remain in compiling and disseminating metadata to document the data quality of SDG indicators at local and national levels.
The adoption of the SDG indicators in 2017 greatly increased the burden and the strain on NSOs and other producers of official statistics in the world in producing development data. Many of the SDG indicators were not compiled in large parts of the world. The figures quoted above show that the required data is not produced regularly for almost half the number of SDG indicators.Thus, it is necessary to greatly increase the statistical activities and, what is more, to extend them into fields where there is little if any collection of statistical data. The nature of the SDGs has also called for data being collected in innovative ways. Substantial effort has been made on providing technical assistance in statistical methods, systems and applications in many countries in the developing world.
The effort to increase the collection of data and the compilation of SDG statistics should have been accompanied by increasing investment in statistical infrastructure and increasing government expenditure on statistics. This has not been realised. Nonetheless, some successes have been recorded, mainly based on various donor funded programmes. These have in particular focused on training on methods and statistical systems as well as direct technical assistance. Examples are the application of digital technology in various surveys, such as household surveys and farm surveys, and innovative methods in capturing data through aerial photography. Moreover, the years 2018 and 2019 saw some notable overall increases in SDG data collection in the developing world. In 2020, however, the COVID-19 pandemic severely halted the progress in the compilation of SDG indicators. Official statistics in developing countries were hit hard by the pandemic. Many statistical offices had to close down temporarily and work remotely on their tasks. In several countries, face-to-face collection of data had to be curtailed, resulting in surveys being much delayed or scrapped altogether. In some countries, statistical budgets were cut as a result of the pandemic. All of this has added to the difficulties of collecting the data necessary for the SDG indicators while at the same time showing up the great need for providing funds for statistical capacity building.