PARIS21 Receives Record Response as SDG 17 Indicators Custodian

Ahead of the release of the UN Secretary-General's 2020 Report on Progress Towards the Sustainable Development Goals, PARIS21 received a record number of responses for the three SDG indicators for which it is custodian.

To help monitor and report progress on SDG 17 indicators 17.18.2, 17.18.3 and 17.19.1, PARIS21 received responses from over 50 percent of UN member states in each sub-region. The results of PARIS21's indicator reporting provide a global snapshot of statistical development under Agenda 2030.

Highlights

• 141 out of 247 countries and territories reported having a national statistical plan under implementation in 2019, with 92 of those plans fully funded.
• 13 countries advanced from not having a plan under implementation and fully funded to having a national statistical plan since 2016.

• Sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest percentage of fully funded plans with only 25 percent (8 out of 36) under-implementation plans fully funded, while 95 percent (36 out of 38) of plans currently implemented in North America and Europe are fully funded.
• In 2019, 132 countries and territories reported to have national statistical legislations that were compliant with the United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics.
• The largest regional grouping of complying countries is North America and Europe, representing 32 percent of all compliant countries (42 out of 132). Half of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) also reported compliance.
• 31 countries have advanced from having no statistical legislation that complies with the UN Fundamental Principles to adopting statistical legislation since 2016. Progress is also encouraging in LDCs (6 countries), SIDS (4 countries) and LLDCs (4 countries).

Why is it important?

By establishing a strong, coherent, feasible and politically backed national statistical plan, a country can establish a strategy for developing statistical capacity across the entire national statistical system (NSS). This strategic vision allows a country to ensure production and dissemination of core statistics in line with the country’s development plans and in response to the growing demand for high quality, timely and accessible data. It also provides a framework for mobilising both national and international resources.

International cooperation must focus on increasing support to statistical planning to ensure SDG data collection so that more countries can adopt national statistical plans in the critical effort to achieve Goal 17.