Tech for good governance key in attainment of UNSDGS

Daryl Bhana, Vice President of Sales and Strategy at Global Voice Group.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs), when set out and adopted in 2015, were designed to be the blueprint for achieving development globally. While the SDGs recognised that economic prosperity for all could only be achieved if people and the planet were cared for in equal measure, what has transpired today, is that one of the key obstacles impeding progress toward the SDGs is insufficient actionable data. The Brookings Institution in its report titled Africa and the Sustainable Development Goals: A Long Way to Go, published in 2019, affirms precisely this, stating that minimal progress has been made towards the SDGs specifically due to a lack of actionable data.

The United Nations (UN) Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed further reinforced the importance of data, stating that "data is a crucial element; data is the lifeblood of planning.”; with a UN survey having found that in Africa and Asia, on average, data for only 20 per cent of SDG indicators is currently available. The World Bank has found that only 35 per cent of the African continent has poverty data collected since 2015. Therefore, while the UNSDGs lay out a broad, ambitious vision for our world, without timely, accurate, relevant, and disaggregated data, policymakers and their development partners have little by way of data analytics to turn their promises into impactful actions for communities on our continent.