UN World Data Forum in Cape Town, South Africa

Time: 13:30–15:00 (SAST)

DI involvement: DI is hosting the plenary along with UNICEF. Judith Randel will moderate and Tony German will be on the panel

About: The main plenary on leaving no one behind will provide a platform to reiterate the political message that we cannot achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) unless we have more and better-quality data – that is the revolutionary aspect of the data revolution. The plenary will be formed of three sessions: the first will give keynote introductions to the building blocks for better data to leave no one behind; the second will focus on the need to make all individuals visible and to increase and improve disaggregation to take account of people’s identities; the final session will explore the ways that political energy can be generated and maintained to support the use of joined-up data so people are included in progress. This will be followed by a Q&A.

Breakout session
CRVS and sustainable data infrastructures: long-term investments in a short-term world

Date: 17 January 2017

Time: 17:00–18:30 (SAST)

DI involvement: DI is hosting this breakout session

About: The 2030 Agenda requires that the data infrastructures needed for monitoring the SDG indicators should be in place by 2020. This short-term deadline has impacted on the way technical and financial resources are allocated. The development of mature Civil Registration of Vital Statistics (CRVS) systems takes time, and investments into CRVS are suffering. This session will make the political case for the need for long-term investments to build sustainable data infrastructures.

Breakout session
Pilots for perpetual censuses: community-based data collection

Date: 17 January 2017

Time: 15:15–16:45 (SAST)

DI involvement: DI is hosting this session and Bill Anderson will moderate

About: Producing socioeconomic statistics that can be disaggregated down to the lowest level of government and service delivery is currently prohibitively expensive. But what if local government itself was responsible for collecting the data required to plan and allocate its own resources? What if local communities benefited directly from their own data? What if local data collection were to become a key vehicle for building trust between communities and local government? This session will take the form of a collaborative discussion sharing knowledge and experience from Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Malawi.