The World Bank has published a new policy note on how Open Data can support development in areas that relate to the Sustainable Development Goals. The publication emphazises especially the benefits of Open Data in the areas of economic growth, improved public services and increased transparency as well as for facilitated citizen participation and better information-sharing within governments. However it also underlines the special value of Open Data for agriculture and illustrates that it can improve agricultural techniques, transparency and efficiency of markets and the empowerment of consumers.

In this regard, the World Bank sets a special focus on the GODAN initiative as one of the main international partnerships promoting Open Data. Additionally, the publication presents other initiatives by individual governments and private companies that provide Open Data to support the agricultural sector.

Additionally to the value of Open Data in different domains to support the Sustainable Development Goals, the publication gives the following recommendations for governments and their data users to support Open Data:

• Support Open Data use through legal and licensing frameworks.
• Make data available for free online.
• Publish data inventories for the government’s data resources.
• Create feedback channels to government from current and potential data users.
• Prioritize the datasets that users want.
• Make detailed, disaggregated, inclusive data available.
• Protect privacy rights.
• Provide sufficient data about the data.

Have a closer look at the publication here.

If you are interested in finding out more about how access to information (and more narrowly open access) can foster sustainable developement, you are invited to participate in the e-forum on “Sustainable Development Goals: The Impact of Access to Information on our Societies” from the 7th until the 18th of September 2015. The forum is organized by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and you can find more information here. If you are interested to participate in this online event, use the form at

https://dgroups.org/fao/ciard-econsultation/sdgs-impact-access-information-societies/join.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. 

Website at https://dgroups.org/fao/ciard-econsultation/sdgs-impact-access-information-societies