UN Data Forum opens in South Africa to harness power of data for sustainable development
The inaugural United Nations World Data Forum kicked off today in the South African city of Cape Town, bringing together more than 1,500 data experts from more than 100 countries, with the aim of building broad consensus on how to harness the power of data for sustainable development.
Organized by the UN in cooperation with the South African government, the four-day gathering also aims to rally support behind a new global action plan.
The Forum comes at a crucial time for strengthening data and statistical capacity globally. Countries all around the world are mobilizing to carry out the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which they adopted at a UN summit two years ago,” Wu Hongbo, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, told a press conference at the opening of the Forum.
To do so, it is essential to have accurate, reliable, timely and disaggregated data. We need to track the unprecedented range of economic, social and environmental goals that are integrated under sustainable development.
This will require everyone in the statistics and data community – from governments, the private sector, the scientific and academic communities and civil society — to find ways to work across different domains and create partnerships and synergies,” he added.
The 2030 Agenda was adopted by world leaders in September 2015 at an historic UN summit. A key component of the agenda is the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which came into force on 1 January 2016, and which set out new 15-year targets for global efforts to end all forms of poverty, fight inequalities and tackle climate change, while ensuring that no one is left behind.
Mr. Wu stressed that the 2030 Agenda also poses enormous challenges for the global statistical community, to modernize and improve our capacity, so that all national statistical offices become the new data hubs for data sources from across many different data systems and provide the necessary data to inform policies, and for national, regional and global monitoring.
“To make this happen, we will need governments, international organizations, businesses, academia and civil society to join forces and work together,” he said.