This event featured AidData's Director of Policy Analysis, Samantha Custer, speaking on our research pertaining to data use and uptake by policymakers from the Counting on Statistics report, the Listening to Leaders 2018 report, and GeoQuery, AidData's free spatial data platform.

What’s the issue?

With just ten years to go, an ambitious global effort is underway to deliver Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This presents an enormous opportunity for development actors to align their results frameworks, data and systems for better evidence-informed decision making. The SDG monitoring &evaluation (M&E) framework adopted at national level can serve as a platform for shared generation and use of data on development results by both countries and their development partners, helping enhance the development impact of their efforts and enabling mutual accountability among all stakeholders. Yet at the country level, capacities are limited and the increase in demand for development data in the wake of SDGs has created new challenges (alongside opportunities) for already under-resourced national statistical systems (NSSs). Governments and their development partners also face a growing demand for monitoring and evaluation. Moreover, the data and systems relevant for M&E in countries and for development partners are not always well-aligned with each other, nor with those meant for official statistics, and synergies between these systems are often missed.

This event aimed to...

• Explore the potential and pitfalls of leveraging SDGs as a shared results framework, and the roles the statistical community as well as the results and evaluation communities can play to make itwork.
• Assess state of play, challenges and emerging opportunities of -
• Alignment between global, regional, national priorities (results frameworks),
• Linking a shared framework for results with strategic production, sharing and re-use of country data
• Identify win-win opportunities, scope for synergies between official statistics and M&E systems and implications for funding data and statistics