"The SDGs need researchers to fill critical data gaps"

GCUA 2030 recently hosted a webinar on ‘Monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2024 SDG Report: An Overview’ with Daniel Eshetie from the United Nations Statistical Division. Daniel is a statistician with UNSD and possesses a wealth of experience working with National Statistical Offices and international partners on projects related to SDG indicators.

The webinar was well attended by students from GCUA 2030’s Agenda 2030 course and participants from across the GCUA member universities. Daniel gave an interesting account of his role working with the Global SDG Indicator Framework to monitor progress towards Agenda 2030. This included an overview of how indicator data is collected and combined from diverse sources – including from national statistical systems, line ministries, and regional organisations – before being harmonised into an end product in the form of The SDG Global Database – https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal.

Daniel elaborated how this database is used to monitor progress on Agenda 2030, and provided highlights of the recently published SDG Report 2024, which is available online: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2024/. In particular, Daniel drew attention to major setbacks in some goals, but also highlighted areas where tangible progress has been made. This includes for instance in reducing global child mortality, preventing HIV infection, and access to energy and mobile broadband. He especially emphasized how commendable progress has been made in improving data availability for SDG monitoring, where today 68% of indicators have good data coverage and all 231 indicators have a well-established and internationally agreed methodology.

However, in closing the discussion session of the webinar, Daniel made a call to action to researchers – highlighting where action must accelerate in critical areas that undermine Agenda 2030 progress as a whole; climate change, peace and security, and gender equality. Significant data gaps remain in these priority areas, for which only about 20 % of countries have available SDG data still in 2024. Daniel therefore emphasized the crucial role that researchers and research can play, in deep diving into these data gaps to explore improvements – in particular for better implementation of indicator methodologies and means of data collection.