 Welcome everybody. I'm Massimo Tomasoli. I'm the Permanent Observer for International Idea to the United Nations. And I'm talking today as the coordinator of the SDG16 Data Initiative for 2021. The SDG16 Data Initiative is the organizer of today's event on measuring progress on SDG16 and the impact of the pandemic in achieving peaceful, just and inclusive societies. I have, first of all, to say that today's meeting, today's virtual event is being recorded. So we are on the record. Please take that into account when you take the floor. A couple of initial announcements. Once you join the meeting, please make sure that you mute your mics. And also that you switch off your cameras until in case you are given the floor. This will be an interactive session. We have a number of panelists, but we'll try to have also a possibility of questions and answers. The questions will be posed via the chat. So please send questions using the chat function to everyone. And during the session, the interactive session will make sure that your questions will be addressed to the panel. In that case, please also indicate your name and affiliations when you post a question. Just a few words of introduction. If I may situate today's meeting in the perspective of broader 2030 agenda. I cannot avoid talking about the SDG 16 data conference that is starting tomorrow, organized by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs by the International Development Law Organization and the Government of Italy. Today's event is aiming also at contributing to the conversation that will take place in the next days in the context of the SDG 16 conference. And it's in a way also a follow up to another side event that we organized during the first SDG 16 conference in Rome in May 2019. It's been a long time since there are many things changed. We all know about the challenges that the pandemic has posed to the implementation of the 2030 agenda and today we'll focus in particular on the SDG 16 but by zooming into the goal that deals with peace justice and accountable institutions. To take into account the implications for the implementation of the agenda as a whole. If you consider the efforts at the national level that aim at building back better as the secretary general of the United Nations said, it is very important to take into account these three elements. Peace, access to justice, and the quality of institutions. The SDG 16 data initiative is a consortium of 17 organizations dedicated to the implementation and open tracking of progress towards the targets included in SDG 16. The main aim of these initiative is to integrate official indicators with non official indicators the official indicators that have been approved by governments at the UN statistical commission, and which have also guardians in the UN system in order to collect and systematized information at the global and regional level. They need integration with the non official data, and these data are provided by a wide range of non state international organization and other actors. The consortium pulls together these actors and produces a, first of all, a non line database with data. And that is accessible to the public, and also a global report that is annually produced the last report was produced last year, but data referred mainly to 2019. The impact of the pandemic was in its initial stages of analysis, and many things have happened since then. One of the main issues has been in our perspective, how to address the impact of pandemic on inclusion of perception and other indicators that are not included in the official indicators in order to monitor progress on implementation of the agenda and clearly the pandemic has had a major impact. Also in terms of data collection and analysis, including for official indicators. So I think that these will be one of the underlying themes of today's conversation. We have a panel composed of some representatives of some of the institutions that compose our consortium. I will briefly introduce each of the panelists before I speak. The panelist is Sarah Chamnes Long, Director, Access to Justice Research, or the World Justice Project. She will focus in particular on target 16.3 among other things. Sarah, you are the floor. Thank you. I'll just give me one moment while I share my presentation. Alright, so as Massimo mentioned, I'll be talking today about progress on SDG 16.3 on rule of law and access to justice. So I'll be talking about addressing many of the themes and guiding questions of this panel in two main sections of this presentation. One will be focused on why rule of law and access to justice matter right now, and that will be anchored in data insights from our rule of law index and our global legal needs survey. And then I'll turn to broader data challenges and opportunities on SDG 16.3. So why do rule of law and access to justice matter right now. These sites I'll be sharing come from WJP's rule of law index 2020. This is a quantitative assessment tool designed to measure adherence to the rule of law and practice. It covers 128 countries and the scores in the index come from primary data collected from household surveys via our general population pool and surveys to experts in civil and criminal law, labor law, and public health. And through all of these surveys we collect data on more than 500 question level variables that are used to construct the scores that I'll be speaking about now. And just a note that our rule of law index 2020 was published right before the beginning of the pandemic. But nonetheless, I'll be talking about some key trends that are really relevant to the current moment, and that we'll want to monitor as the next iteration of our index is released and also in the coming years as countries grapple with recovery from the pandemic. So in this first slide. This looks at countries performance over the course of the last year so it kind of plots them out. According to whether they perform above or below the median rule of law index score and whether their performance has improved or declined in the last year. And we can see here that more countries rule of law index score has declined in the last year than improved so 55 countries saw a decline 44 saw an improvement and the remainder were unchanged. And this is a consistent trend that we've now seen for three years in a row. And this trend holds for developed democracies as well as less free states. So when we delve a little bit deeper into what is driving this decline, we can look at the eight primary dimensions or factors of our rule of law index, which are constraints on government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice and criminal justice. And here we can see the percentage of countries that have seen an improvement or a decline in each factor over the last year and over the last five years. And what's striking here is that we see persistent declines over time in the areas of constraints on government powers, absence of corruption and fundamental rights and these are areas that are particularly susceptible to erosion during emergencies. So this is an important trend to keep an eye on in the coming years. And very importantly rule of law matters for public health. So we see a strong correlation between our rule of law index scores and a number of health outcomes, including maternal mortality infant mortality life expectancy and chronic disease. So what we see here on the left is that as countries rule of law index score increases, chronic disease mortality rate falls and on the right hand side as countries rule of law index score increases life expectancy also increases. It's important to know that this trend holds, even if we control for countries GDP level of spending on health and genie coefficient. So what this tells us is that rule of law is really important for the functioning of institutions and their ability to translate expenditure and other resources into outcomes that improve the lives of people. Next I'm going to talk about just a few data insights from our global legal needs survey. So this was a household survey administered to more than 100,000 households in 101 countries between 2017 and 2018. The data from this survey are captured in a report called global insights on access to justice that highlights the most common justice problems in countries resolution processes and outcomes. In the survey instrument used to collect this data provided the methodological basis for the 16.3.3 indicator on access to civil justice that was just adopted by the UN statistics commission about a year ago. So one important finding from this data is on some of the most common justice problems and preliminary evidence and reporting from legal service providers, surveys to justice experts, among others are showing that many of the most common justice problems that are required to the pandemic are on the rise. So here we have a set of 20 randomly selected countries from our survey and the incidence of 12 broad categories of justice problems. And we see that family disputes housing disputes problems related to money and debt and problems accessing public services were very common and we already know that these are on the rise will be important to pay attention to these in the recovery from the pandemic. Access to justice problems are on the rise. There are many key barriers to access to justice that we already know are being exacerbated by the pandemic. So prior to the pandemic about fewer than a third access any form of help to deal with their problems about one in six people gave up trying to resolve their problems. Approximately the same proportion reported that it was difficult or nearly impossible to find the money they needed to resolve their problem. In my quarter reported a negative physical or health physical or stress related health impact and about more about one in five reported economic hardship as a result of their legal problem. Now we already know that many institutions are closed dealing with backlogs and reduce staff as a result of the pandemic. And also there's large economic fallout as a result of the pandemic. These justice barriers will only likely increase and we need to keep an eye on these. Lastly, it's important to talk about the relationship between poverty and inequality of experience. So this shows data from our legal needs survey and it shows the incidents of problems experienced by those who receive government assistance and from those who do not. And in every country we see that recipients of government assistance are more likely to experience justice problems than those who are not. And we see a similar trend for people who are unemployed for people with long term health problems or disabilities victims of crime and other marginalized groups. We also know that poverty has been rising as a result of the pandemic. The World Bank estimates that an additional 120 million people have fallen into extreme poverty in the last year. And the ILO estimates that 225 million job full time jobs have been lost in the last year. And this is four times the rate of job loss as compared to the 2009 financial crisis. So because we know that this relationship exists, we know that there will be rising poverty and inequality of justice experience. So this is something that policymakers will really need to address in the coming years. So data challenges and opportunities. Before I delve into the specific data challenges and opportunities, I want to talk a little bit about the role of data and realizing SDG 16. I realize this might be kind of preaching to the choir, given the panelists who will be speaking today and the probably the profile of those who are interested in this topic. But it's important to touch on this because many policymakers might not see the importance of investing in data at a time when there are many urgent demands on resources. So I just kind of want to take a second to talk about this too because we can't just assume that everybody realizes the role of data. One is that data is important for making the case for investing in rule of law and access to justice. Data can show us and quantify the cost of weak rule of law or poor access to justice and also quantify the benefits of investing in both. It can also provide a diagnostic for appropriate justice services and policies without data policymakers might not be investing in justice services that have the greatest impact, or they might not be targeting justice problems that have the greatest costs to people and society. Data is also a mechanism for building trust and accountability. Trust public trust and institutions was already deteriorating prior to the pandemic and in many cases has only gotten worse as a result of some country's response to the pandemic and data that is open accessible and well communicated can help build public trust and help communicate that officials are making good on their commitments. Also data is important for ensuring that no one is left behind without data on the needs and experiences of marginalized groups. We really can't assess to what extent the countries in the global community are delivering on the promise of leaving no one behind. But what are some of the challenges of the data ecosystem. One is an over reliance on administrative data from institutions. Many people don't turn to formal institutions to resolve their justice problems. In addition, right now, many institutions are partially closed have limited staff. And so their ability to, you know, engage in data collection efforts might be even more constrained than prior to the pandemic. And in addition, people might not be turning to formal institutions to resolve their problems or turning to institutions at all. This can be addressed by turning to surveys such as crime victimization surveys and legal needs surveys. However, these are expensive and infrequently used. In addition, they often rely on face to face interviews which have been difficult if not impossible during periods of the pandemic. In the case of justice, there's many different institutions that are collecting and using data from statistics agencies, judiciary, civil society organizations, administrative agencies. And there's oftentimes a lack of coordination among them lack of information sharing lack of agreement on key metrics and definitions. There's also limited capacity to collect and use justice data. This is in part due to human and financial resources but also many decision makers might not seek out data or might not have the expertise to make the most of the justice data that is available to inform their decision making. And lastly, there's an underdeveloped culture of monitoring evaluation and learning in the justice sector. We're far behind other social sectors such as such as education and health when it comes to monitoring evaluation and learning. And as many of you are probably already aware, this was one of the obstacles to getting SDG 16 and target 16.3 even included in the sustainable development agenda in the first place. Sarah, you have another minute. So how do we grapple with all of this? This year, the World Justice Project and Pathfinders released a Justice Data Challenge paper with three key priorities to advance people-centered justice data. These priorities focus on understanding the scope, nature and impact of justice problems, designing and delivering people-centered justice services, measuring what works and learning and adapting. There were several sub-priorities within each of these, so I'd invite you to review the paper. But three key themes that cut across all of these priority areas were a focus on partnerships, so partnerships between official and non-official data producers, as well as partnerships with other social sectors. A focus on innovation, so again using non-official data, but also innovative data collection strategies and service delivery models. And then also there's a focus on people-centricity, so putting people at the center of the data we're collecting and the services, justice services that are being delivered. So with that, I will end my presentation and look forward to the discussion. Thank you very much, Sarah. That is quite impressive. I want just to recall that target 16.3.3 access to civil justice has been, as you said, incorporated in the indicators, thanks also to an advocacy that you spearheaded with other organizations and we are very happy to measure that and to have data today on that, based on perceptions. So the next speaker is Tobi Mendel, Executive Director of the Center for Law and Democracy. So, Tobi, you are the floor. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. I should mention in advance that I have a cold, so if I cough during the presentation, you know, it's not because of COVID, I actually had a COVID test a couple of days ago, so you don't need to worry on that front. So I'm the Director of the Center for Law and Democracy. We're a human rights organization which focuses on foundational rights for democracy, of which access to information, which I'll mainly be talking about today is one of our main themes. And I'm also, I have another hat, which is that I'm the chair of FOIA Net, Freedom of Information Advocates Network, which is the large, but by far the largest civil society network of access to information activists globally. So that's the main mobilizing network for civil society in this space. So I will be focusing on SDG indicator 1610-2, which talks about the adoption and implementation of laws giving individuals a right to access information held by public bodies, which I will call the right to information, which is the emerging modern term for that light. Now, the right to information has been recognized as a human right under international law, so it has its own direct benefits, but it also brings a wide range of external social, political, economic benefits. For example, it's been widely recognized as an important antidote to corruption. So for today, I'd like to focus on two of those benefits, which I think are very relevant to our conversation. And the first is the enabling role of access to information in relationship to other SDGs. And it's been widely recognized that the right to information and openness in general, so the right to information gives you a right to access information held by public bodies, but public bodies are open in other ways as well. You know, through that law. But the right to information improves development, I would say, in every sector. I know that's a bold claim, but I think it's true. And for some key structural reasons, first of all, the right to information facilitates participation by access to information people can participate in much more profound and real ways. Partly through that participation, it leads to a much greater sense of ownership over development initiatives and ownership over development initiatives is really a crucial to their success. If government just delivers development to the people, that's that's one model which has never been successful and ownership is a much, much more important way to do that. And it also promotes a lot greater accountability in government, so that governments must actually pursue their promises in the development space. So I think in that way, the right to information improves outcomes across all development areas, whether it's in the area of environment, women's equality, health, basic livelihoods, or anything else. So it's really a core enabler of the other SDGs. And I should mention that while I'm talking about the right to information under 1610-2, the companion right under 1610-2, 1610-1, sorry, the right to freedom of expression also plays a similar enabling role. It allows people to participate, it holds government's account. So that's also a companion sort of right. And the second issue that I think the right to information is very important for is building trust. Even before COVID, I think the world in general, not every country, but by and large, was at an all-time low in terms of the level of trust between government and people. That was a crisis already. And COVID has really dealt that issue a body blow. That's partly because of the role of dismiss information. And I think everyone on this conference will be aware of the impact of that. So I won't spend time on that. But I think there's another slightly more subtle but no less important factor displayed a role here. And that's, I think that even decent governments, and I would put my own government, the government of Canada into that category, were, I would say, economical with the truth during COVID. They told us from the beginning that they were applying and following the science and they were doing that, most governments or at least good governments, let's say, not all governments, of course, unfortunately. But what they didn't tell us was that the science was incredibly emergent and underdeveloped and unreliable, especially at the beginning. We didn't know anything about this pandemic. We were being told to accept massive, unprecedented restrictions on our fundamental rights, especially the right to movement, but other rights as well. In the name of this pandemic, by and large, citizens went along with that. But the claims on behalf of science were too strong. Governments didn't say to us, look, we don't really know what we're doing, but we're doing our best. That would have been true. What they said instead was we're following the science. Please, just believe us. So I think that that has really eroded trust in government in really profound ways. And again, I think that openness is an absolutely essential part of the antidote to that part of the solution. And I would just give one example. In most countries, we know what vaccines our governments have bought, what kinds and even maybe how many of them. But what we rarely know, most countries have not published the contracts for those vaccines. So we don't know, for example, how much they cost, what the delivery expectations are. Other crucial information, which in terms of accountability, in terms of our ability to rely on the delivery of vaccines, all sorts of issues which are of the greatest importance to us these days are still hidden to us. So I think the governments really have to step up to the plate in terms of openness. Moving now to the SDGs, and I mentioned before for 1610 to there are two elements, the adoption and implementation of right to information laws. My own organization has developed what we call the RTI rating, and it's a comprehensive assessment of the legal framework for the right to information in every country which has adopted a right to information law that currently we have 128 countries on the RTA rating out of 129 that have adopted those laws. The RTI rating not only tells us whether a country has adopted a law, but it goes in great detail into how strong that law is, and also the precise features of that law. Does it have a quick timeline for responding to requests? Do you have to pay to make a request? What are these exceptions? Are they in line with international standards, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a very powerful tool for assessing the legal framework. When it comes to implementation, however, the matter is much, much more complicated. And the core complexity here derives from the fact that the primary obligation holders under RTI laws are individual public bodies, the Ministry of Health, the Central Bank, the Armed Forces, and in any country there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of these bodies. So tracking their delivery of this SDG is enormously complicated. In the best cases, each public authority reports on its own performance in this area to a central authority that a central authority integrates all of that data and publishes a central report. So we can see, for example, how many requests for information were made in the country, how many were answered, how long it took, detailed information like that. So that's the ideal approach, how official approach. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of countries that doesn't happen. In many countries, no such reporting takes place at all. And in almost every country, many of the public authorities don't report under that. So it's really essential that we have parallel systems of data collection, whether they're official or quasi-official or run by civil society organizations. And there are three main such central tools. UNESCO and JCO is going to speak after me. UNESCO runs one for 2021. They have a survey which is answered by a public authority, by the lead public authority in the country. It has eight questions. Only three of those questions, though, focus on implementation. So it's a very, I would say, limited probe into the quality of implementation of these laws, which is really our challenge area. And the other five, and I will let JCO disagree if you will, but the other five, I think, are already completely answered by the RTI rating because they look at the legal framework and we already know every legal framework in every country through the RTI rating. Secondly, there's a FOIA net, the civil society network. It has developed a simple methodology for civil society organizations to apply. It's simple, but it's quite a lot more detailed than the UNESCO methodology. And since 2018, different civil society organizations in different countries have been applying that, often repeatedly. So, for example, my organization applies it every year in Canada. And then finally, my own organization, the Centre for Law and Democracy, has developed quite a sophisticated methodology for assessing the implementation. That can be applied either by civil society organizations or by the Central Information Commission, the oversight body for this right. And I would say that that provides the most sophisticated assessment of implementation. It's quite an in-depth deep dive methodology. We have only applied it or completed the application in a couple of countries. We have a number of countries that are ongoing. And just to give you a sense of the quality of that, we're just starting to apply that in Vietnam. The Vietnamese government is officially required under its own access to information law to evaluate the law at the three-year point. It is in the three-year point this year, and it has already unofficially approached us and sort of said, well, we're really looking forward to your data because we know that's the best data that's going to be out there. So I think it really highlights the importance of parallel data. And I would say in this area, the parallel civil society data is the best data. Coming now to COVID, and I know I'm getting to it. You have only one minute left. Only one minute. Okay, so just a few quick points about COVID. I mean, basically, this issue, we were doing pretty well globally on this issue pre-COVID. Every year countries were adopting laws. Implementation was a challenge, but at least it was moving forward. COVID has dealt a body blow to that. For example, 2020 was the first year in 30 years that no single country adopted an RTI law. No new countries at all in 2020. Many countries just stopped applying these laws altogether. They just stopped responding to requests, just didn't do it. And I would say all three methodologies were seriously impacted by COVID. It was much more difficult to run those methodologies. Jacob may talk a little bit about the experience of UNESCO in that respect. And I would just like to end up with a few recommendations. Firstly, I would call on UNESCO, and I think I speak for most civil society organizations. We really appreciate the excellent work that UNESCO is doing, but we feel it should be significantly more ambitious in its methodology. The eight question survey is great, but it needs to be more in-depth. We applied the UNESCO methodology in 2019. I can't remember exactly how many questions it had then, but quite a lot more than that. Secondly, we call on states, of course, to continue to adopt and implement the access to information laws. And also from an SGGDI point of view, we call on them to be much more open to incorporating civil society data into their formal reporting. Only a few countries have shown a good openness towards that. Not only to blame others, but I would say civil society also needs to take on a little bit of responsibility here. We need more civil society organizations to be doing these parallel assessments that we need them to be done in 30, 40, 50, 60 countries, not just the dozen or so that is taking place in. And finally, I would call on donors to allocate far more money to this area. I'm conscious of what Sarah said, that everybody's economy is strapped at the moment and that people are overspent, but there is really a very, very limited amount of funding. Most of the civil society assessments that are taking place are done voluntarily and I think that we really need to have more support from the donor community on that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Toby. You brought into this conversation a very interesting and I would say spicy argument on integrating official and unofficial data and we have an opportunity here with the next speaker. Who is a jaco Detroit chief of universal access to information section at the communication and information sector in UNESCO to talk about the point of view from the guardian of an official indicator so jaco you are the floor. Thank you so much. And thank you to be I think also for introducing this subject as we take a specific look at SDG 16.10.2, which is on access to information. Now, UNESCO is the UN custodian agency for the specific indicator. And the reason why we want to to to collect the information is that we would like to to see how we can improve policies and practices of access to information. Now, as Toby said, this indicator looks specifically at at the questions related to the adoption and the implementation of access to information provisions and we have eight questions. Eight questions are related to specific principles of access to information so that we could measure at least what is being done in terms of its implementation. As it relates to specifically oversight mechanisms, appeals mechanisms, records keeping and reporting and then finally the limited scope of exemptions. As Toby said, we used to have a much more complex mechanism of 23 questions, but we had to reduce it as as this questionnaire was prior primarily destined for information commissioners, the data protection and privacy commissioners and human rights commissions or ombudsman. So, we, when we consulted these data holders, they also indicated the kind of data that they can directly and within the time frame through a questionnaire actually answer. So that is a little bit the background in terms of of the this SDG. If we go to to the countries that have access to information guarantees. I think Toby mentioned already 127 countries for in 1990 they were only 14 countries so there's definitely an increase in terms of these these guarantees and its existence but in terms of implementation we also have to look what that definitely means. Now, in our survey, we had only 69 countries that that responded with data on on and 89% of them actually did have constitutional statutory or policy guarantees on access to information. We concentrate it also very much on the existence of of oversight bodies and I think they what is also important that there's a variety of oversight bodies as I mentioned earlier. And that makes it's very difficult actually to report from their perspective on the activities on the relationship with the executive and other bodies of of of the state, etc. And finding I think also a very universal way of reporting on this with comparative data is something that is not easy, at least within this specific field. When we asked questions as it relates to disclosure and refusal of information, only a few countries responded and provided data on the specific elements so countries seem not all of the walls not all countries seem to actually collect this data. And I think this highlights the importance also of record keeping within these specific institutions and government as in a whole when it comes to to public information. Now, if we if we look specifically at keeping the promise on access to information, especially during the times of covert so Toby already mentioned this in the last few last year in terms of covert no new laws were adapted. There were definitely infringements in terms of access to information laws because people did not adhere to the three part test that looks at how access to information is provided by law, how it protects legitimate legitimate interest and how it protects. Also, the necessity to protect legitimate interest so we have we had several of these cases but I think it's also important to mention that during this time, there were also some good examples of countries that used ICTs in order to release more information and accessible formats in different languages, etc. If the covert definitely impacted the ability of countries to implement the access to information laws. And, but I think that what is also important is that when we reach out in collecting the data from these different partners that you can see on the screen. They were definitely hampered by the fact that not all of the time they were actually in in contact with those that that keep the data in terms of of access to information to be mentioned earlier that in some countries, there could be thousands of these government institutions that look specifically at access to information so covert definitely hampered the whole process. Also in terms of reaching out to the institutions in terms of obtaining the right information there was definitely an impact in terms of this field. When we look at the question of access to information is specifically the element that was raised on on official data and non official data I think we see a definitely a multi stakeholder approach when we look at the question of access to information, where UNESCO definitely targets oversight bodies specifically as a coordination thing body that that provides us with access to information information, but that we also feel that needs to be enhanced in its role in coordinating access to information among the different public institutions, but we also see of course, a role of civil society, where institutions like Tobias institution, then have very specialized and deep information that is being produced in terms of the implementation of access to information laws. UNESCO also supports at the same time, some of the civil society organizations that want to produce shadow reports on access to information, and all of these different information sources actually advocate for the importance of access to information within the different countries. We also work very closely with international networks that promote the questions of access to information so specifically the professional bodies like the ICIC or RTA that that definitely play a role in order to find the space for information commissioners within the scope of what good governance actually means. I'll maybe stop there and I'm more than happy to for any questions that you might have over to you. Thank you very much, Jacob. And as you said, this is really a request to the audience if anybody has any question that we'd like to pose to the panel, you may start using the chat function to post your questions. And then we can proceed with the interactive session to provide feedback to you. The next speaker is Roberto Kukushka is a research coordinator at Transparency International. Roberto, you're the floor. Thank you very much. I hope you can hear me and I'm also about to show my screen. So I hope that works. So everyone should be able to see my screen by now, correct? Perfect. Well, I'm going to be focusing here on the work that Transparency International has been doing on measuring mostly the indicator on corruption. So that would be 16.5 so bribery and corruption. As you may know, we produce several indicators and data points that have to do with this. And before starting, I think it's important to give a little bit of an overview of what we have been up to over the past year and a half, so to speak. Last time that we spoke, I think we had only finalized our corruption survey in Latin America and a lot has happened since then. One of the first things that we did when COVID happened or appeared was come up with a bit of a thought experiment that would help us explain to the world why, even though the focus of everybody would likely be on COVID and the pandemic itself, it was also important to keep an eye on corruption. So very similar to what Sarah explained on rule of law and what was being also said about freedom of freedom and access to information. I think what we did was precisely try to explain what are the interlinkages that make corruption an important thing to fight in the middle of a pandemic. And we came up with this report that you can find on our website. It's called Getting Ahead of the Curve. And it looks at how we foresee corruption and COVID interacting with different elements. So with civil and political rights, different checks and balances for government, state capacity, the economy, inequality, social cohesion and trust that was also already mentioned today as a big issue. The information landscape, we also went into analyzing what could be the impact of this for big tech companies and also for illicit financial flows and then an overall assessment of what this could mean for international affairs. So this was more of like a thought piece, so to speak, to bring attention of why corruption is important, but also why the data that we have been producing for years is important to be looked at in the current context. Because I think it could explain a lot. So moving on, I think as we start every year at Transparency International with the launch of the CPI, one of the things that we did this year was, again, to bring attention to the issue of COVID and how corruption matters here was to triangulate the corruption data that we produced through the Corruption Perceptions Index with some of the COVID statistics that we were seeing. And in this case, we took data from the Varieties of Democracy data, or dataset, where they counted basically those countries where the response to the pandemic had registered no major violations, for example, to the democratic standards. And they registered also those who had minor, some or major violations. And what we saw is that as expected, and I think as Sarah was already mentioning earlier as well, those countries where we have low levels of corruption were the ones where we saw the least violations to democratic standards in the response to the emergency, which also comes to show that fight corruption is important, not only in the times of the pandemic, and that's also something that we saw. We saw an increase of people coming to us and say, hey, even donors, for example, saying, hey, Transparency International, COVID is happening. There is now a need to channel funds to developing countries. How do we keep those funds? How do we protect that from falling into the wrong hands? And I think at the time part of the answer that we kept giving was, well, you know, this is why you need to put up these systems before the pandemic hits and before any emergency comes, because once the emergency happens, then without all of the necessary checks and balances and all of the constraints that you need to prevent corruption, it is more likely that what the aid that you're allocating will be much more less effective. So this is what we try to use the Corruption Perceptions Index to draw awareness to. And at the same time, we have also been producing our, so to speak, primary data, which is our survey data on perceptions, attitudes and experiences of corruption through our global corruption barometer, which now has a more regional approach. So since we spoke in 2020 about the results in Latin America, we have finalized the GCB in the Middle East and North Africa region, the GCB in Asia, which was published also in late 2020. And we now have just finalized the fieldwork. I mean, if we finalize the fieldwork in December for the GCB EU, which will cover the 27 countries of the European Union at the national but also some of them at the subnational level. So we have this time bigger samples to be able to also analyze the data at the subnational level. And we're also conducting a survey in the Pacific. Both of these, the last two were meant to be done by last year, but of course due to COVID and one issue that Sarah already mentioned as well. We had to delay the process. So, in order, and one of the challenges that we've been facing is that in many of the countries that we wanted to cover. The ideal methodology to gather data was of course with face to face surveys, which was made impossible by COVID. So we could not send people to Asia, for example, to like the 17 Asian countries that we covered, asking face to face questionnaire. So we were limited to then a sample of countries where phone coverage was good enough to do a phone survey. Same was the situation in the EU. Fortunately, in the EU phone penetration is good enough to conduct this sort of exercise over the phone. And the Pacific has been a real real challenge. And we have now come to accept that the results that we will obtain from this study will be, you know, might not be nationally representative but will be biased towards the urban and richer population because of the methodological choice. So we're aware of this. But we still thought that it was important to to conduct the exercise. And then in terms of how we see the world going after COVID hit. I think it's important to say here that the progress in, you know, the fight against corruption and controlling corruption, according to many of the measurements that we have is actually going at a glacial pace, not really advancing very much. So it's difficult to say that COVID came and and slow it even further. So we were already seeing very little progress. And I think COVID might have reverted what we see in some places. But when we look for example at the data that we obtained from the corruption perceptions index since 2012 until now, we only see 26 countries where the scores have improved significantly. And another 22 where the scores have declined. And if we triangulate then this with some of the data that we have from the global corruption barometer, I think many of these trends get actually supported by the data that we get from citizens. In terms of, well, I guess the indicator that is most aligned with what we're measuring as well for the SDGs is the one on bribery and the latest that we have the latest survey that we had. Well, the two more are coming, but the one that we just concluded was Asia in November 2019 so that one is already published. And we see again, sort of a mixed bag in terms of where bribery rates are going. In some countries we saw an important decline. So in countries like India, Myanmar, Malaysia and Thailand and Vietnam between 2016 and the data that we have now, we saw important declines. In other countries we just saw mostly the same numbers that we had five years ago. So in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Mongolia and Sri Lanka, it was more or less the same. And we saw the bribery rates go up surprisingly in countries like South Korea and Taiwan, which also shows that I mean, even when focusing in this very narrow understanding of corruption as bribery. The more developed countries should not just stop paying attention to the problem of corruption. And another thing that we are now doing with the GCB data is to go beyond this narrow understanding of corruption as bribery in many countries. So there's a lot of criticism, for example, on why sometimes perception based indicators or such as a CPI does not do not really measure or do not really coincide with the data that we see on bribery. And one of the responses to that is that we believe that citizens have many more tools to assess the level of corruption in the country that just the experience of bribery. So one of the questions that we have now is also the use of personal connections to access or to obtain a service. So it's not only that sometimes you have to pay to get a service, but sometimes you also see people that, you know, jump the line or get something they're not entitled to by pulling strings, so to speak. So that's also now a question that we're including as a staple in all of our surveys, and it proved to be actually quite high in Asia. And I mean, we are now only analyzing the results for Europe, but I can already give you a bit of a teaser, so to speak, that there are some very surprising results across the European Union as well, which also shows that, you know, the problem of corruption is not fully solved here either. And finally, just another minute. Yes. Perfect. I that's all I need in terms of challenges and opportunities. I think many of them and I promise I did not copy this from Sarah or the previous speakers either. I think said the challenges that we face. I already mentioned the methodical choices that are limited. The problem of ensuring data quality and keep ensuring data quality when you cannot really do the most robust methodology that you can have. Another problem that we're facing is how to ensure the sustainability of such surveys. Since as it was already mentioned, there's not a lot of money now to do this there's a lot of demand for victimization data and for this type of data, but not a lot of support. In terms of challenges, sorry opportunities, I think it is time for more organizations to build alliances and work together to address the data challenge. I think the world has in more and more the importance of having good and reliable data to inform the policy design and decision making. And finally, I think we're also now starting to see how there's this more multi-dimensional thinking. So we're now starting to see more as well the interlinkages between different sources of data and how corruption might be related to rule of law. It's also of course important to bring in the freedom of information indicators and so on. So I think creating these stories with more sources of data would be really important moving forward. And I will just leave it at that and happy for any questions that may come. Thanks a lot, Roberto. Very interesting and impressive also the interlinkages across the various presentations. We'll come back to that in the closing debate. And now we are going to listen to our last speaker, my colleague and friend Alberto Fernandez, senior program officer at international idea, Alberto, you have the floor. Thank you very much, Massimo. And I will try to be brief as the last speaker. So we'll start by sharing my presentation. So I'm going to try to walk you through a little bit how we are measuring democracy and to a larger extent governance in different countries and how that monitoring. It's helpful for the SDG 16 monitoring. And also a little bit to know how we are seeing the pandemic affecting many of the indicators that that we that we consider so very briefly just very important element of our measurement and that's why it is pretty comprehensive is because we don't understand democracy as just one element, but rather an aggregation of different components. So what you can see here, we see democracy as having five pillars checks on government fundamental rights representative government participatory engagement and impartial administration and then each of these pillars have sub pillars that are give you a comprehensive understanding of each of them. Democracy by definition also governance is not just elections, it's multi dimensional, and it looks different in every country. But it's also important to understand that democracy is still certain elements that are common to them based on this understanding what we do is that we find different databases that gather all this information for each of the elements. We use a lot of the information that has been presented here today. And we use data from other organizations like political to rescale political for the lexical index of electoral democracy, varieties of democracy, you and data so we cross both official and unofficial data. So it's better to get a measurement of all this, just a little bit of technicalities. We wait everything and we provide the scores to all of these attributes from zero to one. What we get, we get this picture. I choose randomly one country this is Sri Lanka, and we get a comprehensive picture of all of these different elements of clean elections elected government free political parties, etc, etc. We get a classification also are they performing high mid level mid range or low, and we can compare. And that's very important at the country level but also at the global level. So if you look at how we understand democracy, there are eight SDGs, there are, I mean, almost all of them but more in detail, eight SDGs are included in our measurement of democracy obviously SDG 16 is the one that we measure more comprehensively and it is included. So, of all these sub components of SDG 161356710, especially six and seven, but we have measures of all these. So, by looking at our indices, we can get a pretty good understanding on on how countries and regions are moving in the implementation of SDG 16. 16.7 the answer responsible inclusive participatory and representative decision making at all levels is definitely the one that will encompass better what we are trying to measure and the results that we get. So what was the situation before the pandemic. And, and, and this is important to understand also where are we heading now and what type of information we might be needing in the future. Before the pandemic. We saw a very uneven geographical evolution of SDG 16. In the Middle East, where are the ones making the most progress. This is also a consequence of them starting for a very low point in in many aspects. And even if they were doing the most progress, they still need to catch up, especially in 16.6. There's a lot of space for them to to get to the other rates, global level in most of our indicators. Latin America and the Caribbean and North America have since significant challenges in combat combatting corruption, producing violence, and on fundamental freedoms. This is something that was a surprise and that is holding this region behind in many aspects. In the case of Europe, we have seen declines also scores. I mean, we're relatively higher so Europe, even though they're closer to achieve most of the elements on SDG 16, there are still moving not in the right direction moving in the wrong direction. And the Pacific has has has made many, many significant advances made many significant advances before the pandemic. A lot of challenges remain on civil liberties. And then the pandemic came and to a certain extent, we are still trying to understand what has been what is going to be the impact. And we've seen a few trends that are important to highlight. As one of my co speakers say the trust key governance institution is declining globally, this will affect growing executive this will create growing executive overreach, growing mistrust, mistrust of political parties and other key actors that are fundamental to democracy. And, similarly, an increasing power of the liberal forces and we're seeing the soul over the world. Our liberal forces are capturing the discourse and are getting more and more vocal of their of their proposals. Justice has stagnated globally because of the pandemic, and it might take many years to recover and this is something that is will be a challenge to measure gender equality. And the decision making remains far from from a chief and inequalities are treated in the system unity of democracy, which is coupled with persistent corruption there are probably two sides of the same coin. And the shrinking civic space was already mentioned, especially freedom of expression is also taking a significant hit after observing the pandemic for a year and a half almost. This is what we can add to this picture. We have measure 64% of countries have implemented concerning messes and concerning messes are messes that are either a democratic that are not necessary, not proportional or not legal within the legal system of of the countries these messes have have had a negative impact on democracy and human rights and human rights and they might, they have to be addressed in the near future. 54% of countries have restricted freedom of expression and media integrity this is probably the most worrisome development. This is something that we have seen all over, especially in non democratic regimes. And it will, many of the laws that have been passed are not temporal but permanent laws that have been passed in the midst of the pandemic, usually under states of emergency. 85 countries of the 166 that we are measuring have made an excessive use of force while implementing measures. And this is also a worrying trend, because it is, it's going to be difficult to measure this. So to finalize with some very, some positively positive notes. We have seen how the pandemic has also created more participatory institutions in certain countries, especially those who have managed the pandemic better and rule of law. If it is not strong, it has withstand the crisis. This is difficult to measure it's difficult to understand to measure this, you know with official or with an official data, but we have seen that the rule of countries with strong rule of law system are the ones who have been able to to withstand better the crisis, complementing what was saying the first in the first presentation. And that will also be a challenge in the future in terms of measurement is also the increasing importance of certain social aspects health, which is related with SDG three more inclusive human settlements SDG 11. And in some cases and it's something that it's probably we need to also understand how to measure is more open governments. In New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Uruguay, Taiwan, which all of them happen to be some of the most successful countries in handling the pandemic. So there is also an important factor in how opening governance has has also had a very positive impact in in the pandemic. And I'm going to stop with that sorry for being a bit in a hurry, but I wanted to allow time for questions. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you also to those who have started to post questions I see in the chat that there is already a conversation between some participants. I see, in particular, the question posed by Maya sterling to the panelists about what who typically funds this kind of data collection who would want to fund more of it. And there is also a another question that is or remark that is made by Marianne Rickman that is specifically to Roberto. Thanks for the presentation and could you please type the link or the presentation in the chat. Maybe you can do that to Roberto. I think that we have time for some 15 minutes of exchanges. Those questions were already partially responded by Toby and others in the chat, but we'll get back to the panelists. Let me just make a couple of general comments. One is that it is interesting to see the convergence between the different presentations on a number of different issues these has already been highlighted by the various panelists. What strikes me in particular is the issue of trust in institution, which is so important for the achievement of the agenda as a whole. And many also refer to the difficulty of collecting data from non official sources, especially when the so called social distancing or physical distancing is is a barrier to collecting face to face information. So these as an impact on the methodology may have also impact in terms of the openness of the responders because even in those countries where there is a good phone coverage, which is another major infrastructure barrier as an alternative to face to face interviews. There is also the issue of privacy of, you know, the game as as an element that is related to the general issue of trust. Another interesting convergent trend is the role of different stakeholders in collecting data from official and non official sources in order to paint a better picture of the situation. This is something that some of you already stressed. For example, the conversation that we heard in the dialogue between Toby and Jaco on data on the adoption of legislation on one hand and data on implementation is something that predates the COVID-19 pandemic. And it is what I would call a sort of systemic issue that needs to be addressed not only on 1610.2, which is the indicator that we're referring to but actually cuts across all the other presentations and and also other targets as well. So I think of what Sarah said in terms of access to justice and the presentation on corruption by Roberto. Alberto told us about overall trends in the in the pandemic environment is also interesting as it affects other SDGs. I think all of the panelists spoke of their particular perspective in the light of the enabling function of SDG 16 from their particular area of work corruption access to information access to justice. But what Alberto stressed is also that it goes well beyond individual targets. So sort of again a systemic approach on how SDG 16 is an enabler for the the whole of the SDGs is important. Let me just refer to the analysis he made about gender equality, which is SDG 16 and in turn SDG 65 as an enabler and an accelerator for the SDGs as a whole on gender equality. So I would like to know whether there are other questions or comments that you may make you have two options. One is writing in the chat the question and please identify yourself when you write it, or maybe making a comment in which you would give you the floor. Meanwhile, I would get back to the panelists, maybe they can say something more about the other elements that actually cut across all the presentation that is the need to fund this type of data and what are the main sources of funding. Who wants to come into this. Yes, Toby. So I raised it in my presentation and we've been chatting about it in the chat. I mean, I think that part of the problem here is that, you know, merely, merely assessing isn't quite as sexy as building something new or doing something, you know, contributes in a direct way or considered to be a more direct way to a developmental objective. And so, you know, it's one thing, you know, in my area, it's one thing to work on getting a country to pass on access to information law. You know, donors are usually pretty happy to jump in on that if it seems like there's some chance of that happening, but just getting to assess what they did with it afterwards doesn't look sexy enough. So I think we need to have a little bit. I mean, we need and I think donors need to step up the plate a little bit understanding that assessment is not an outside feature. It's a core, you know, element of the success of these initiatives. You know, you can't just build something and they just leave it there. You need to continuously monitor and evaluate and assess or you don't know whether what you've done is working. I think that we need to kind of deepen that understanding a little bit and then perhaps some of the funding will flow. And if you will permit me to, I just, I was really interested in Alberto's comments, several comments about, you know, declines in fundamental freedoms under 1610 and some interesting statistics about that. And I would point to, perhaps this is a bit glib where putting it, but a pandemic within a pandemic, because what we've seen in the area of freedom of expressions, my organization also does a lot of work on freedom of expression. And what we've seen in the area of freedom of expression, obviously the digital transformation, which is now no longer a new phenomenon, but a deepening, I guess, and you know, constantly evolving phenomenon. And in the last five to 10 years, in the first, you know, going back before that, we saw that pretty much as a positive thing, you know, people were unable to speak, repressive governments couldn't control them very easily. You know, it was a huge democratization of the communicative space. But in the last five to 10 years, we've seen a lot of negative impacts as well. The whole missing disinformation, hate speech, you know, attacks on gender equality. I mean, there's a lot of negative impacts on that too. And those are real impacts and we don't really have a clear framework for how to address those effectively while still respecting fundamental rights and freedoms. And what we've seen in that situation and it's significantly exacerbated during COVID is governments being highly opportunistic and sort of thinking, okay, you know, everybody's concerned about this, I'm going to just jump in with a law that does something. I'm going to ban false news. You know, even though under international law, that's clearly not a legitimate solution. And so we've seen both, you know, governments that are genuinely trying to control this and problems and other governments that just want to control freedom of expression as this always mean the case. So I think and COVID has somehow by diverting our attention and by somehow making it seem that these problems much more serious than it had been before has really opened up the opportunity for governments to be opportunistic in this space. So we've seen a lot of negative activity and I would suspect that quite a few of those rollbacks that you mentioned Alberto on 1610 relate to digital legislation, as opposed to more traditional areas of free speech and that's that's a very contested zone basically. Thank you, Toby. And before getting back to Roberto, maybe let me also read from the chat from Stephen Buckley, a question that has just been posted increased the use of video conferencing due to the pandemic seems to have increased the public participation in government decision making. This is actually pointed to that Alberto also made has there been anything more than and a doctoral evidence. This is from Stephen Buckley open gov metrics.com. Yes, Alberto. Um, thanks. So two things. I'm going to first take this question. And then answer to Toby's comment. I am not aware of anything more than a total evidence. Perhaps what it might have happened is that some of these deliberative democracy or participatory democracy processes that were already taking place and it goes from the French assemblies in Ireland, the French climate crisis, citizen assembly on climate crisis and many other examples in, for instance, in Latin America very active in this sense. They might have become a bit more accessible or easy to organize because everybody was at home. A lot of people what had a lot of free time in their hands. And, and, and they maybe felt that was the right moment to do that. But I haven't seen anything more than anecdotal evidence. OECD is doing very good job gathering data for OECD countries, but it's just limited to those countries. So we're missing basically the rest of the world. What Toby was highlighting, I think it's after being for a year monitoring the different measures and events related with COVID. The aspect that has had more concerning developments is personal security, which is not just difficult, but it's understandable because for the first time in most of our lives, we were restrained. We couldn't leave our houses so it's bound to happen that there is a lot of security incidents all over the world of people who wants to leave their houses and so on. That's kind of like expected. But the pandemic within the pandemic I actually love that that that expression, it's very worrisome and this is related with freedom of expression and media integrity, both of them. These are the three things as you rightly pointed out. A lot of countries use the opportunity never let a good crisis go to waste. Use the opportunity to pass fake news legislation. We haven't seen a country that has been very successful in that and that goes from Cambodia through Germany so all the spectrum of countries that they haven't had very much success in passing legislation that controls the phenomenon but doesn't pass an attack to the office person. A lot of countries have passed different laws. I don't have the number but we have we have actually get gotten that number so I can pass to you I think we have a list of a country that has passed this type of legislation during the pandemic. We have seen an extreme increase in prosecution of journalists all over the world like cases from Tanzania withdrawing media license to outlets because they were reporting that there actually was a pandemic in Tanzania while the government was denying that public broadcasting institutions just blindly supporting the strategy of a country which puts into question the the independency of the broadcasting institution. A rest of journalists for covering hospitals that type of thing we have seen an extreme increase in that. Another very worrisome point is the control that many countries have done of the information so many countries play with the data they excuse it like they they they present data until they got the right data. So, there is, well, we have seen all over the world how countries have tried to manipulate the data. And we are we have seen more countries that didn't want to show the whole data or that they just took like a couple of weeks to release data, just so it looks better that type of things than countries that actually open up their data and they were as transparent as possible. Some unexpected countries actually were really transparent like Vietnam or Singapore, they were really really open with their data which is, they usually don't score very well in this type of measurements but they were actually very open with the data and again if we if we're working with this correlation or potential correlation between openness and management of the pandemic. Well, both countries were very very successful in managing the pandemic. Thank you very much Alberto. I have also a question for actually from me to Sarah because I, I found your slides on a broken data ecosystem and the path ahead are very general relevance. What do you say the in the broken data ecosystem in particular about not only assessment and monitoring but also evaluation and the use of data for that purpose looks to me very important for a forward looking agenda on building back better. So maybe you could expand a little bit on that and then I will get back also to Jacob and and to Roberto with another question, please. Yeah, on the point of evaluation and assessment I kind of like how Toby framed it just a few moments ago as maybe not seeing that as something, you know, apart from, you know, the policy work of delivering on SDG 16 but part of the process. And the OECD has been doing really good work on providing. This is in the context of justice but I think it can apply to other governance areas. I'm developing frameworks for you know people centered justice policies and part of that whole policy design process is using data at the outset as a diagnostic and then at the end as an assessment of what works so that you can basically learn and then improve and it essentially is a continuous cycle of learning so I think part of it is just baking in evaluation data and measurement into the policy design process. I think one of the things that the WJP team has been researching a lot too is is trying to understand why in the realm of justice we are so far behind on measurement and evaluation. I think for a long time there were kind of, you know, kind of cultural and ethical concerns within the justice space of, well, you know, if you're going to do an impact evaluation. There's a treatment group and a control group and one group isn't receiving the justice intervention or one group is maybe receiving a justice intervention that hasn't been, you know, tried so there's been kind of a culture, you know, kind of kind of that hasn't been working in favor of developing these monitoring and evaluation systems, but one thing I think that is really exciting and the path forward is there have been more assessments and cost benefit analysis of justice services so, for example, the World Bank just released a report, maybe a year ago on cost benefit analysis of legal aid interventions and basically found that in almost every case, providing legal aid, the kind of the savings outweighed the cost of the program but I mean we need, we need data to help make this case so I think to the extent that data can support more effective interventions, more savings on the part of government, it will help make the case for evaluation and make the case for data for more effective policy making. And thank you for making that important link between the quality of good data and the quality of policies and the responses. Maybe Roberto, I may ask you, you refer to challenges and opportunities and among the opportunities, building alliances, good data and the multidimensional thinking. What would you think would be the main recommendations to our audience in order to turn those opportunities into reality? Well, I think one is what Sarah and Toby have been discussing now, I think is reshaping this idea that data is just produced for the sake of producing data. I think we need to start seeing data as the foundation and the basis of good decision making, good policy design and that money that comes into this is, you know, I think it really pays for itself in a way because it really informs what comes next. So for me that is like one big issue. The second one is that I think we as civil society, speaking from the TI side, we might need to find ways also to cut costs by partnering with other organizations because some of these exercises are quite costly and also need to make use of our data. I think we also have a responsibility to showcase what our data means and to link it to then other situations like to translate it with other sources of data as well to show precisely how the interlinkages work and why it is important to to invest in this data and to establish a benchmark to then be able to to monitor the policies that we enact because as example of the global corruption barometer. We have the funding to conduct one every, I don't know, maybe three maybe five years depending on donor and funding and availability. And with that, it's very difficult then to keep an eye on things if you only collect something every every five years so I think it would be necessary to have maybe a conversation as well with the donor community to say okay, what do you need how can we support you and how do we make this sustainable. And I think that would be great. And the other thing that I, I think we need to do more is also increasing the capacity of civil society because not every civil society organization has the capacity to deal with data. And I don't think there are enough funding opportunities out there to invest in this area as well. So I think it's easy to say you know we need to produce more data and we need to have it out there. But to be to be honest, I know of many civil society organizations that do not have the capacity to either do this, analyze this data, or do anything meaningful with it. And I think I those would be my, my recommendations, and I would just quickly very quickly link path to to the question that was also posted on funding in the in the case of the of the global corruption barometers. We actually get funding from, you know, the big donors, so the Latin America GCB was funded by Canada aid, who has like interest in what's going on in Latin America. Then the EU of course is funded by the Commission was interested in in doing this. And then the one we have in the Pacific was funded with money from Australian aid. And what happens here is that then we are left without any funds to cover other countries or other regions that are very, very important for the topics that we want to cover. So this time we didn't manage to cover, you know, the Western Balkans or Central Asia simply because apparently there is no donor interest there right now. So I think that's also something that needs to be changed. So we demand driven and see where the funding is, but at the same time I think it is a shame when when it goes when it happens like like this that the Asia GCB for example was fully funded by TI own resources, because we thought it was very important to invest in this region. But yeah, I mean, I think that's a reality of the of the situation. So you, you made a very important point. It's about sustainability of these provision of information for better policies. Toby would like to respond. We are ready three minutes beyond our deadline. So if it is just a very quick response site, I'd like also to give the floor to Jacob before we end. Just very, very quick. I mean, I think, I think Roberto makes a really important point about how a lot of civil society organizations aren't necessarily tooled up to do data analysis and with the four in that methodology that I mentioned for assessing the access to information implementation. We develop centrally all of the kind of spreadsheets with codes in them with, you know, coded formulas and stuff like that in them. So I think centralizing tools. And then, and then, you know, it was designed so that, you know, civil society groups are with limited means all over the place could could use it and I think that we can some of the larger central groups with more capacity can really facilitate work by other groups by hand building tools like that. Thank you, Toby. Very important point. Jacob, I turn to you as the last say reaction from from the questions and you represent a custodian agency. It is very important for us to have you here in this panel. You made references to building partnerships you yourself in your presentation made reference to the role of other stakeholders. So what would you see from your point of view as say the main recommendations in order to improve this partnership. Thank you very much. I think that when we look at the question of just positioning data within the agenda 2030, we have to realize that this is an important element for change in countries. And I think this is exactly how we should, we should sell the importance of, of collecting data. And when we collect this data, we cannot do it alone because we will obviously have a skewed view on the data that we collect. This is exactly why UNESCO is also working with other UN agencies with civil society organizations and with governments, which are our main stakeholders. So I think it's only when somebody also mentioned triangulate these elements that we could, we could actually move forward. We, I think we should also be aware of the importance of data collection fatigue. And this is another reason why we should actually work together and not collect the same data, but also have this kind of conversation. Also, where we see the inter linkage between different SDGs and can make use of, of each other's data. As said, I think we do need to then take the question of open data very seriously so that we could share this data also and, and, and compare it. And I think that when we invest in the collection of data, it is very important that, that we also make use of existing mechanisms that that are there. We've seen several of the, the methodologies that have been presented here. We need to make sure that those that are the data holders are involved in the process so that we have, we have realistic expectations of the quality of the data that we, that we can collect and then finally just to repeat that this data is not an objective in itself, but should make a change in people's lives. Thank you very much, Jacob. I want to thank all the panelists and also the participants who pose the questions and interacted on the chat. And my key takeaway from today's meeting is that we had sort of a sense of what the next global report of the SDG 16 data initiative might look like because these analysis is going to feed the individual chapters. And we will, we are working already on the new global reports that will be launched the later on this year. The elements of say the possible opportunities of making the best use of data in building back better but also an awareness of the challenges that still exists and the importance of building partnerships in order to cope with those challenges. So thanks again to everybody. And on behalf of the SDG 16 data initiative. I thank you again for having participated in today's conversation. Thank you. Bye.