Big Data and the Sustainable Development Goals: Innovations and Partnerships to Support National Monitoring
Written by TReNDS’ Senior Advisor, Dr. Cameron Allen, Director, Grant Cameron and program manager, Hayden Dahmm
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present an unprecedented monitoring challenge for governments and National Statistical Offices (NSOs). As a result of increasing demands for data from users, declining budgets, and rising data collection costs, interest has grown in harnessing data from new partners in the national “data ecosystem.” The potential for “big data” to support SDG monitoring has incited considerable enthusiasm with many emerging experiences and use cases which underscore the need for increased collaboration and partnership. However, there is poor information-sharing on how partnerships can support national SDG monitoring. This report provides guidance for countries leveraging partnerships to harness big data to support national SDG monitoring. It synthesizes recent experiences from countries that have used partnerships to harness big data, as well as the latest research collaborations that are deriving new, innovative datasets from big data to support SDG monitoring.