Data governance and ecosystems

  • Digital Compacts: Global Ideals, Regional Realities

    • September 2024

    • Co-authored with Stephen Chacha

    • The Global Digital Compact was adopted as part of the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024. This discussion paper (originally published on the DI website) critiques the compact and compares it with the African Digital Compact.

  • Data Governance: Do all global problems require global solutions?

    • October 2023

    • A blog (originally published on the DI website) highlights some of the complexities in aiming for a global consensus on data governance.

  • SDG learnings from the World Data Forum in Hangzhou: Falling between stools and masters

    • May 2023

    • Co-authored with Claudia Wells

    • The UN World Data Forum took place in Hangzhou, China in April 2023. As a UN conference, aimed at spurring innovation, partnerships and high-level political and financial support, the forum can tend towards diplomacy over discussion, with government and multilateral officials and statisticians lining up to politely agree with each other and champion success. DI set out to invigorate proceedings with a debate on ‘Is the SDG Monitoring Framework Broken?’, which drew on our recent discussion paper of the same name.

  • Is the SDG monitoring framework broken?

    • April 2023

    • Co-authored with Sam Wozniak

    • In March 2023, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific published its annual SDG progress report. It warned that the region requires, at the current rate of progress, a further 42 years to meet the SDGs. It also revealed that there remains insufficient data to monitor 51 of the 169 targets. This discussion paper focuses on the SDG global monitoring system from a data perspective. It attempts to answer the question: Is the SDG monitoring framework broken?

  • Data disharmony: How can donors better act on their commitments?

    • March 2022

    • Co-authored with Bernard Sabiti

    • This paper examines the role of donors investment in national data ecosystems, focusing in particular on the challenges of harmonisation. The issues we describe here are not new – they are well-known and have been recognised by donors themselves over many years. Rather than simply re-stating the problem, the purpose of this paper to promote an open discussion about why – given longstanding commitments to address these issues – progress has been limited, and what both donors and national governments can do to overcome the challenges of harmonisation in order to maximise the impact of their investments in national data systems.

  • The data side of leaving no one behind

    • September 2021

    • Co-authored with Bernard Sabiti and Sam Wozniak

    • Lessons learned from DI’s work on data landscaping.

  • Digital civil registration and legal identity systems: A joined-up approach to leave no one behind

    • March 2020

    • Co-authored with Claudia Wells

    • An overview of trends in civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS). To deliver the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), how can we ensure everyone is counted?

  • Measuring the state of civil registration and legal identity

    • October 2019

    • Co-authored with Angharad Price, Bernard Sabiti and Martha Bekele

    • A proposal for an efficient new system to monitor digital civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) and legal identity systems.

  • What to do with one and a half billion dollars...

    • October 2015

    • The World Bank plans to raise and spend $1,5 billion ($300m every three years until 2030) on household surveys. This single commitment dwarves all other investments that have been made towards building a base for sustainable data collection and usage. It sends a signal that recurrent expenditure producing short-term results to meet the needs of global goals is preferable to capital investments producing resilient country information systems that will have a life way beyond 2030.

  • Quantifying the challenges facing the Data Revolution in Africa: A first attempt

    • September 2015

    • At Development Initiatives we believe there is a need for a more granular and timely resource that reflects both best practice and challenges across all the data sources required to meet the needs of statisticians and the goals of the Data Revolution. This is our first attempt based on a preliminary desk study, which we hope to build upon through more in-depth country-based research. We have built a table for all African countries mapping nine indicators against a simple traffic light system.

  • Some thoughts on the data revolution in Uganda

    • February 2015

    • Development Initiatives (DI) and Development Research and Training (DRT) are working on a ‘Joined-Up Data Uganda’ pilot programme in two rural districts. We are attempting to join up disaggregated data sets from various sources to create usable sub-district (sub-county and parish level) information. Our target users are district officials and community-based organisations. These notes are based on my limited experience working in Uganda and on the observations of our colleagues in DRT who understand the challenges and opportunities of accessing and using information in Uganda better than most.

  • Adventures in the data revolution (three-part series)