BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

A data revolution is underway but there are major gaps in power and knowledge. This calls for creative ways of sharing information and building capacity.

Accelerate The Data Revolution

In the past national statistical institutions have produced official statistics using two main sources of data: surveys and public administrative data. With the total number of smartphone users worldwide expected to reach 2.08 billion, there is an opportunity to transform that process, generating new sources of highly temporal and widely sampled data that could supplement, improve or replace existing datasets. Social media is now used to calculate public responses to health and well-being statistics; smart meter data is used for energy statistics; satellite images for land use, agriculture, and environment statistics.

Similarly, citizen science is starting to create new datasets. Cancer Research's Cell Slider has volunteers analyzing more than two million images of cancer cells online to help identify a solution. The ebird app has become a global network of 2.5 million bird watchers who add their observations to a central database, and it is the one of the fastest growing biodiversity datasets in existence.

How many women died in childbirth in 2013? Even our best estimate could be nearly 40% too low (ODI).

Official extreme poverty numbers could be missing 350 million people (ODI).

Adopt Common Standards

Comparability is key to make data collected and reported by governments, businesses, investors, and others useful for decision making. Agreeing common standards and accelerating their adoption globally will have a key role to play in closing data gaps and encouraging actions that align with the SDGs.

Example Standardization Drives Accountability

The World Council on City Data (WCCD) has been working with the International Standards organization (ISO) to create a standard for sustainable development reporting by cities. These include standards on measuring the performance of city services and quality of life; and standards that are applicable to any city, municipality or local government to measure its performance in a comparable and verifiable manner, irrespective of size and location. The ISO standard enables city leaders to track and benchmark their progress.

The measures for SDG11 are included in the ISO standard and cities are already reporting into the WCCD Open Data Portal. The portal allows for city-to-city comparisons and displays data using cutting-edge visualizations and tailored trend analyzes. The standardization of city data is not only driving more accountability and enabling improved performance, but it is helping attract the capital markets. For example ratings agencies such as Moody's and Standard and Poor's are considered ways of building standards into the ratings process.

Create The Right Incentives

Traditionally, statistics agencies have relied on regulatory requirements to collect business and stakeholder data as a key input to national statistics. Finding ways to incentivise the sharing of information in a way that creates insight and benefit for both parties provides an alternative approach that can help to close existing data gaps and increase the value and use of information produced.

Example Learning From The Retail Industry

Lessons could be taken from how the consumer research company Nielsen obtains data from a range of retailers to analyze, provide insights and then provide to companies (including retailers) to give them industry wide consumer data.

Prioritize Open Data

Open data' is data that is published in an accessible format that allows anyone to access it, use it, and share it. When big companies or governments release non-personal data, it enables small businesses, citizens, medical researchers, NGOs, and others to develop resources which make crucial improvements to their communities. According to the Open Data Institute, open data can play a key role in supporting the achievement of the SDGs in the following ways: i) more effectively target aid money and improve development programmes, ii) track development progress and prevent corruption, and iii) contribute to innovation, job creation, and economic growth.

Example

Open Data Drives Accountability In Nigeria

The Nigerian government, with support from the Earth Institute's Sustainable Engineering Laboratory, developed the Nigeria Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Information System, an online interactive data platform. Using this system, all government health and education facilities as well as water access points were mapped across Nigeria. It reports the latest status of more than 250,000 facilities using data generated with the help of smartphones. Any Internet user can now ascertain the status of every facility across the entire country. The software tools used for the Nigeria MDG Information System are open-source. The tool is being used by local authorities to improve service delivery; it is also being used by civil society organizations to track which infrastructure facilities are fully operational or where illegal logging is occurring.

Connect To Grassroots Data

Data costs money, time, and human effort to collect. Poor people facing some of the biggest problems are often the least well served by current information. Tackling data inequality is an opportunity for new partnerships between governments and the private sector.

Example Building The Capacity For Citizen Generated Data

Civicus's Datashift initiative is supporting civil society organizations that produce and use citizen-generated data in four initial pilot locations: Argentina, Nepal, Kenya, and Tanzania. The experiences from these pilots will be used to build capacity on citizen-generated data across the world, with the aim of informing and influencing global policy processes on the SDGs and the data revolution for sustainable development, (www.civicus.org/thedatashift)

Adapting to climate change is not always a question of infrastructure or technical solutions. Rather, it is a project for households, communities, cities, institutions as well as countries. Companies will need to go beyond their own operations to engage with academics, consumers, suppliers, local groups, regulators, and customers to find out what is really happening on the ground.