The Global Partnership on Sustainable Development Data  works together to achieve the Global Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. The Global Partnership is committed to all sectors to have access to the right information at the right time, in the right formats, and available for the right people to make the right decisions. Your organization can also become a Global Partnership champion.

In 2010 Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, stated that “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until  2003.”

“To achieve the full potential of data-driven development, it will be necessary for all stakeholders – government, the private sector, development organizations, and the public – to work in coordination to bridge these gaps… To be successful, stakeholders must each independently conclude that the sum is greater than the parts and that they can only achieve shared goals through collaboration” (Data-Driven Development, World Economic Forum).

On September 27th 2015, 193 world leaders committed to 17 Global Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) (with further 230 Indicators approved for SDG Agenda) to achieve three extraordinary things in the next 15 years: Fight Inequality & Injustice; Fix Climate Change; End Extreme Poverty.

(Source: Visualizing the Data Difference, GPSDD)

To reach SDGs, international society will need to confront many of the world’s most pressing issues that depend in part on a crisis of poor use, accessibility, and production of high quality data that is stunting the fight to overcome global challenges in every area—from education to agriculture, health to gender equality, and human rights to economics.

On the other hand, a data revolution (the terms  was coined in  2013 during the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Post-2015) is sweeping the globe with new technologies, skills, and opportunities to connect official statistics, big data, citizen-generated data, geo-spatial and earth observations data for the public good.  The opening up of government data to improve policy-making, foster entrepreneurial innovation and empower citizens is further bolstering the data revolution.  Last but not least, the availability and access to high quality data is essential to measuring and achieving the SDGs.

To harnessing the data revolution to fill critical gaps, and ensure data is more accessible and useable to end extreme poverty, combat climate change, and ensure a healthy life for all, leaving no one behind, on September 28th, 2015, at the 2015 UN General Assembly, The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD) was officially launched. The United Nations Foundation (UN Foundation) was selected to serve as GPSDD’s host organization.

The GPSDD is an unprecedented, multi-stakeholder group consisting of governments, civil society, private sector, international organizations, academic, statistical and data communities, and networks who represent all sectors of society and constantly expand their network in order to achieve together the SDGs by 2030.

To achieve the SDGs and respond to the demands of the data revolution , countries will need to do more of the hard work of developing capacity and producing better, higher quality, timely, accurate, highly disaggregated and useable data. Civil society will need data converted into useable and contextualized information, presented in languages they can best understand and use.  All this will take time and resources.

To successfully deliver the new SDGs  agenda,  the GPSDD is accomplishing the following goals:

• Support multi-stakeholder data initiatives which connect the data revolution in achieving the SDGs making sure that the data revolution for development is inclusive and equitable:

(Source: Visualizing the Data Difference, GPSDD)

• The launch of the GPSDD represents the most substantive effort yet to see the data revolution move from a concept to a reality for stakeholders across the world.

(Source: Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform of the UN)

• Contribute to identifying and filling data gaps, using original data as well as new data in achieving SDGs:

(Source: Visualizing the Data Difference, GPSDD)

•  Help to develop and build support for international principles on discovery and disclosure of data : 

• Help to tie, share and leverage the current, privately held data: 

Closed or poor data is an important factor in bad decision-making and weakens accountability, thereby limiting the ability to tackle pressing issues such as poverty and hunger, environmental protection, and humanitarian crises. One of the main ideas behind the Global Partnership, therefore, is the need to better link the growing number of data producers and users to provide the detailed, comprehensive information required to effectively drive sustainable development forward. 

• Adopt open terms of use for data, make data downloadable in machine-readable and non-proprietary formats, and make data websites easy to navigate:

(Source: 3 lessons from the 2015 Open Data Inventory)

• Organize local, regional, and global data events to advance increasing connectivity, collaboration, and innovation towards achieving and measuring the SDGs:

(Source: Historic launch)

These events will be critical to ensure a fully functional ecosystem of data users and producers at the community, sub-national, national, regional, and global levels. The GPSDD is supporting multi-stakeholder network of more than 150 data champions (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN is one of the partners!) harnessing the data revolution for sustainable development. 

This Global Partnership aims to be an inclusive, comprehensive platform that will support all sustainable development stakeholders by promoting:

• Standards and policies that bolster global, national and local data initiatives;
• Data generation that can help to fill key data gaps, especially for monitoring the SDGs
• Expanded data access for policymakers, civil society and citizens
• Data use to improve development outcomes, through peer learning and catalysing financial support for data revolution and capacity building on data use for mutually benefitting collaboration among diverse stakeholders.. 

Publication of ongoing work of the Global Partnership in a series of deliverables to be expected in September 2016:

(Source: Partnerships for SDGs)

Global Partnership is open to welcome new data champions. As a first step, share a commitment you  would like to offer relating to this work.

(Source: Who we are, GPSDD)

Recognising that no single stakeholder can propel progress alone, the Global Partnership wants to foster unprecedented cross-sectoral coordination and collaboration across the full gamut of sustainable development actors, from citizens to statistics professionals.

The GPSDD is looking for a dynamic and  innovative Executive Director.

The Global Partnership on Sustainable Development Data

See also:

Open Data Charter

Open Data (ESRI)

­ APFSD 2016: Special Event on the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (April, 2016)