Development data are at the very heart of the new “Global Goals” for sustainable development: Yet gathering enough of the right sort of data to track the goals is keeping statisticians like me awake at night. Luckily, a new Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, or GPSDD, launched in September, may allow us to successfully take on this massive challenge.

Fixing the problem of scarce and poor quality data requires actions on many fronts, but let me start with my hopes for the GPSDD:

First off, I hope it will bring communities together, to help people work together. You might be surprised, but working together is not a new thing for statisticians (I know, you have this mental picture of geeks working behind mountains of survey forms…). And there are lots of other communities working together with data, too: Geo-spatial experts, governments, academics, companies … They’re talking amongst themselves, but they aren’t always talking across sectors or communities of practice, and the new partnership will be a long awaited and welcome venue for connecting these diverse players.

Second, I want the partnership to help harness new technology and data sources so that there can be a “Data Revolution” for development, something called for in ‘A World That Counts’, the report of the Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development. New techniques and new data sources can improve the understanding of societies, the economy and the environment, with levels of granularity that are without precedent. This offers great potential, and many governments, companies, researchers and citizen groups are already experimenting, innovating and adapting with these sources. But many other development actors are excluded because of a lack of resources, knowledge, capacity or opportunity. The inequalities in access to data and information, and in the ability to use it, are growing and the GPSDD will help to bridge that gap.

Third, I hope that the GPSDD will help mobilize new resources for financing investments in data and innovation. A recent study by Open Data Watch, ‘Aid for Statistics: An Inventory of Financial Instruments,’ identified around $285m in annual funding for development data, but noted that catalyzing innovative approaches is under-resourced. There is limited funding available for supporting the replication of effective innovative approaches for data production and analysis activities in a country’s data “ecosystem”, including national statistical systems. Investments like these can have a long-term impact on the effectiveness of institutions and data systems.

Readers should not be left with the impression that, outside of GPSDD, nothing is happening. To the contrary, there are many other exciting initiatives, innovations and collaborative data efforts under way that could inform or potentially be threaded into the GPSDD. A few fresh examples include:

• The establishment of a Commission on Global Poverty to better track progress on the goal of ending extreme poverty. Set up by WB Chief Economist Kaushik Basu, the commission will use crowd sourced inputs to revisit the approach to internationally comparable poverty measurement in an effort to improve how global experts track extreme poverty.
• A pledge in October by the World Bank Group to work with developing countries and international partners to ensure that the 77 poorest nations have household-level surveys every three years with the first one to be completed by 2020.
• The launch of a Satellite in Global Development website that breaks down how remote sensing and other companies capture, analyze and distribute satellite images for use in measuring dimensions of sustainable development.

The bottom line is that the World Bank is committed to working closely with the GPSDD to improve coordination, mobilize urgently needed resources, and kick start a Data Revolution for Development.

Will you join us?

Haishan Fu is World Bank Director of Development Data. She had previously served as Director, Statistics Division of United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP); Chief of Statistics at the Human Development Report Office of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and Senior Research Associate at the Guttmacher Institute in New York. She is, among various appointments, a member of the UN Secretary General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, a Council Member of the International Statistical Institute, and Co-Chair of the Global Steering Committee for the Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics.