UNSD-FCDO About

About the project

In December 2016, the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) formally agreed to conduct a project with what is now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, supporting twenty countries in Africa and Asia in strengthening their capacity in the compilation and use of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators and making SDG data and indicators available to users, including decision and policy makers. This project is funded with UK aid from the British people. The project has a total budget of 6.6 million pounds sterling and will run until mid-2021. Out of the 20 countries across Africa and Asia, nine participated in a previous project of UNSD and the UK Government on the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) indicators.

The impact goal of the project is Effective monitoring of the SDGs and improved evidence-based policy making. The main project activities include: the support to the pilot countries in the development of national strategies for monitoring the SDGs; and the creation or upgrade of national data and metadata platforms of SDG indicators. Further, the project will work with members of the National Statistical Systems (NSS) in improving the collaboration and data exchange across agencies and help them in developing strategies for how to engage users of the national platforms.

Deliverables on the global level are an SDG data and visualization platform that provides comparisons between global and national datasets, and the establishment of an automated data exchange based on the Statistical Data and Metadata exchange (SDMX) standard. Where differences in figures exist, the reported metadata will help explain the reason for these differences.