 Enrico Giovannini is the moderator for the next panel. Enrico, hello. Come here for one second. Morning. Good morning. What is your moderating? Good morning. Okay. All right. Much better. Because we're going to talk about data. So if you sleep just before talking about data at the end, it will be better. I know. It's like tired and data, no hope. What is your moderating style? I think you gave us a little bit of a clue there, but what is your moderating style? First of all, trying to have people wake up first and then try to engage them, although the time is very short. So prepare your questions that you had in mind and never asked. All right. Very good. I will leave you in the very capable hand of Enrico. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. I'm Enrico Giovannini from Italy and co-chair of the Trends Group, which is one of the task teams of the Sustainable Development Solution Network dealing with data. As I said, data is something that people say is dry and so on. But do you know the origin of the word statistics? No. It's science of the state. And it can be about the state of things, but also state with capital S. This is why we are talking about this today, because without data, we will never know whether we are moving in the right direction, but also data are an ingredient of sustainable development, not only a tool to monitor. Today, we will present a great report produced by our group. And so I'm glad to ask the main author of this report. Please come in, Jessica Espi, who is not only a great expert in this field, but work very hard for delivering the report on time for today. And we have also two distinguished panelists, Jenna Slotin, who is a senior director for policy and strategy for the global partnership for sustainable development data. And Antonin Cia Azare, who is a director general of the Ghana Health Service. And he will help us to understand how data can really change policies and change people's lives. So, Jess, you have the floor for a presentation. Thanks very much. Thank you, everyone. It's an absolute pleasure and honor to be with you all and to follow such distinguished panelists in the previous sessions. As Enrico said, my name is Jessica Espi. I'm a senior advisor to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. And I've been working very closely with an incredible assortment of leading minds on data and statistics from around the world. Enrico is one of our co-chairs. And we're joined by some of the other members here today, such as Shada Badi, who's one of our other co-chairs. It's been a real honor and a pleasure trying to work on this topic. A few years ago, if someone had told me that I would have become one of SDSN's data gurus, I would have laughed. But suffice to say, as Enrico said, it has become sort of one of the hot topics of politics and of the Sustainable Development Agenda. And I've found it's become a really exciting area of work for us across the network. So today, we're going to just briefly summarize our new report. I say briefly, because I want you all to read it, so I don't want to give the game away. But it is available on SDSN's website. So, just a quick overview from me. So, everyone's talking about data and statistical systems within, certainly within the UN corridors, and why is that? As everyone's heard today already, in any 15, 193 heads of state and government put us in the path to a completely transformative new agenda for the world towards sustainable development. And when you get down underneath the politics, when you start to look at how you do this in practice, very quickly the data rubber hits the road, if you will. And it all becomes about predominantly quantitative measures of progress. So, we've been starting to think through and trying to help member states, local governments, local actors, think through the kinds of information they need to achieve these ambitious goals. But it doesn't take very long to kind of dig underneath the covers and realize that the data that we have currently is grossly sort of inadequate. We have huge problems of timeliness, coverage, quality, and so on. Just a fascinating new report came out a few days ago called Ready to Measure, which shows us the state of gender data relating to the sustainable development goals. And they showed us that of the 53 gender related indicators we need to fulfill the objectives we have set ourselves, only 20 are ready to measure. So, if we don't know where we're coming from, how are we going to get where we're going? I flagged a couple of the issues to do with quality, timeliness, statistical capacity, and so on. But what are the solutions? And that was really the mission of this report and this piece of work that our data expert group has been focusing on. The first is always investments. We need more money. I think everyone knows that. It's the constant plea. We need to build robust statistical systems that help governments really understand the information they need to affect change. But perhaps more excitingly, we need to harness the so-called data revolution. So what is the data revolution? What's this data thing everyone talks about? The short answer is it's everything. Every time you go on to book a flight, every time you order a takeaway, every time you send a text message, you are passing information from one entity to another. And that information has inherent value. This is a really interesting new study that's just been done by the Australian government who looked at what are the economic implications of the data revolution. And they concluded that it is the biggest shift that's going on, structural shift in the economy within a generation. It's fundamentally changing the way we run government. And it's got a really long way to go. We're at the tip of the iceberg of understanding how new information systems are going to transform politics and economy. So with all that in mind, we've been trying to think about what a modern fit for purpose 21st century data system looks like and how governments can achieve this in order to support their efforts to meet sustainable development. And very quickly, it's obvious that there's no one right way, there's no one perfect statistical system. And I think we'd be naive to suggest we had the answer to that. But there are some big things we do know. Firstly, we know that the scale of the challenge is immense and consequently it needs to be a multi-stakeholder partnership. And with new actors coming on board, it can't just be the government anymore who's leading the charge and trying to collect official statistics. Second, we know we need to take the best innovations from the private sector and from aspects of the public sector and apply those to how we generate information. And third, we know we need the highest level of political engagement. We really need heads of state, government, the UN system really, really saying, okay, data is a big priority. It's a hot topic. It's not relegated to a small department somewhere buried across government. So what is this modern statistical system? Firstly, it needs to do three things. For the first time almost ever, people are starting to realize that statistical systems don't just look backwards. They have to look forwards. I think we all know from what's happening with Hurricane Jose, with Hurricane Irma, with all the climactic shocks and events we're seeing at the moment, that we need to try and plan for and predict this kind of change and try and manage some of this uncertainty. And that means we need to model future scenarios. We need to forecast what's going to happen. And that requires quite different skills than we've ever seen before within data and information systems. We need people who can do modeling and so on. So it's not just about collecting static points of data. It's about looking forwards. Second, we need data that's going to enable us to manage more effectively. We need to know whether a health service in real time has got the vaccines it needs, has got the staff it needs, whether school teachers are arriving and attending their classes. And we need that to be current information, not two years, not three years, not five years out of date, if we're actually going to have responsive government. And third, we need to monitor historical progress. Now this is what we have traditionally been doing relatively well in spite of all the gaps. But what we haven't done is make the most of this historical data. There are so many reports and I think everyone in this room would know how many reports and data sets and so on that are sitting on shelves gathering dust. And so this is about pulling all those pieces of data and information together and trying to make new value out of those inherent legacy systems. Now I don't expect you to even remotely read this slide. It just goes to show the range of different actors we have involved in this new statistical system. And just a quick example from the health sector. If you think about collecting something as simple as mortality data, an essential fact and figure that we need to know to understand the well-being of our populations. Normally you would collect that using administrative data, data that's coming out of a hospital or a health service. You might have a civil registration and vital statistics system which tells you when births and deaths and marriages and so on have happened. But a huge number of countries don't have that. They don't have the capacity. They don't have the financial resources. So they might ask the UN to help or perhaps the US government. They might come in and help them do a multi-indicator cluster survey or a demographic health survey. Once they've done that they might decide they need academics to help them clean and tidy the data. They might turn to the University of Washington that has one of the best international health metrics and evaluations units. And then they might decide oh well we could also use data from the insurance sector or we could turn to Google analytics to look at where future trends of health and you know, unwellness are likely to occur. So the point is there are loads of actors that are contributing data these days but very seldom is all of this information taken back to the national statistical system and is it actually used and compiled and owned by government. So that's what we're trying to move towards. But of course there's huge institutional barriers to these kinds of partnerships. People concerned about ethics, about privacy, about security, about the ownership of data. So those are some of the things we need to tackle. Our report has four big clusters of recommendations and I can't do them justice in two minutes I probably have left. But I'm just going to give you a quick highlight of one of each of the recommendations. The first topic relates to governance and leadership. I've already said we need the highest level of political commitment around data and information systems if we're to make sure we don't leave anyone behind. And one of our recommendations is for the creation of chief data officers. Now much like CDOs as they're commonly known in companies will oversee all the bits and bytes of data that flow through a private company. We need that kind of commitment in government. At the moment national statistical officers often sit separate or independently of government and rightly so with some distance. But we need someone sitting in the center of government preferably in the executive office who's able to oversee all the bits of information the government has, can review new sources of data, can try and establish these new partnerships and then turn to the NSO to assess their quality and rigour. So we think that kind of high-level political commitment is essential if we're going to take the SDGs commitments to data seriously. Second we need more principles and standards. This isn't just about principles for principles sake. This is about trying to make sure that if you've got a private company or a university or a government all working together they are singing from the same song sheet. So for example we need very clear standards about how you do data sharing across these different groups. And we in particular are calling for a new data compact to be agreed at a multi-stakeholder meeting of the UN Statistical Commission which means every March but is currently very narrowly defined to just national statistical office members. With more participation with private companies and various others involved in that we could come up with a robust compact around the SDGs and data that everyone would subscribe to. Third we need technology innovation and citizen led analysis. Now this is a huge bucket of recommendations but just one quick example. We've seen some brilliant innovations coming out of different private companies around data sharing. If you look at what happened with the Ebola crisis in West Africa particularly we saw private telecommunications providers working in the government working with the government working with the UN and creating sort of platforms and innovative ways of sharing this proprietary data across these different actors. That's the kind of innovation we need now on a much bigger scale. And so we're calling for an innovation challenge at the World Economic Forum to kick off at the next forum amongst various other sort of high-profile moments where we can encourage this. What I won't skip on also I just want to highlight recommendation three here which is a city group on CGD that's citizen generated data. Citizen generated data is becoming more and more and more important not only to try and fill gaps in the official arsenal but also to understand people's experiences. A good example is you can use a hurricane information system to know where the house has been knocked down or you can use GIS software and a map to look at what's been destroyed but you have no idea how many people were in that house what kinds of services they've been deprived of what their personal experiences were whether there's emotional trauma and so on. So we need citizen generated data in order to help us really understand what we're trying to fix and we're calling in particular for what we call a city group which is a interagency and expert group on citizen generated data to make it a new a much more widely accepted science that we can integrate into achieving the sustainable development goals. And then we need capacity and resources and this isn't just about money that is a big part of the recommendation there's a lot that could be done through a new global financing facility for this these kinds of investments particularly in low income countries and lower middle income countries but it's also about making sure everyone understands what we're talking about when we talk about the data revolution when we talk about data systems when we're talking about our data. So we're thinking about things like partnerships between the statistical commission and UNESCO to actually encourage widespread data literacy training in schools from a very young age so we all know how our information is being used and how we can control it and contribute it to the support of achieving sustainable development. So that's a quick overview of our report I'm sorry it was so brief but I hope you will read it. It was only we've only highlighted a few recommendations I think this is a huge huge huge topic and as I said it requires so many actors to help achieve a new fit for purpose statistical systems for this but we hope that they're the beginning of a process and that if these things can be achieved in the next six months to a year we can really set the world on a effective path to achieve the SDGs. Thank you very much. Thank you very much great presentation let me add a couple of points before opening the discussion with our panelists. Two years ago the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon asked me to chair a panel on the data revolution for sustainable development in preparation of the final agreement on SDGs and we made several recommendations and we have to recognize that the international statistical community took seriously our recommendations and made an effort but let me also say that after two years we are not yet there and we are far from being able to deliver what people, governments, companies want to know about sustainable development. The key issue here is to make a big shift in the way in which statistical offices and others work and work together and this is what our report is about it's about policy it's not about technical issues. The the risk that we are facing is that in two three years time when the General Assembly will meet again to see what we have done over the last five years they will say we are not on the right track and we'll be too late to have what we expect to have from data providers and then there is a big issue of breakdown because the no one left behind principle is a great principle but is a hell of work for statistical offices and very costly way to produce data if you want to have them desegregated by gender region and so on and so forth. This is why you need to exploit the big data. This is not an easy issue and as Jess said we need more cooperation between the private and the public sector and we have to mobilize the public and also the philanthropic sector to invest on these and this is what the global partnership for data for sustainable development is about so I'm very glad to have Jenna here and we will hear from her how they look at this issue and what kind of proposal you can make just to take this project forward. Thank you Enrico Jess everyone for having me here today. It's really a pleasure to be here representing the global partnership for sustainable development data which was actually a recommendation of the report that the the secretary general's independent advisory group on the data revolution made in 2014 and then it was established in 2015 to try to help address this data challenge for the SCGs. So first off I want to commend the trends group on this excellent report that Jess has just described. I think it does an outstanding job of laying out what we really need in terms of the modern data ecosystems to support the achievement of the SCGs and sustainable development more generally and I think what's particularly exciting about it is it talks about both the what and the how. What's needed across the data ecosystem and makes very concrete clear recommendations about how how to get there. I also really greatly appreciate the recognition that it needs to be an iterative approach that it's articulating a big vision while recognizing that each country is going to be in a different situation each group each actor and so there's a lot of there's going to be also a lot of variation. One of the things I want to really really emphasize from this report and emphasize about I think the data ecosystems that we really need as we work towards the SCGs is this point about a multi-stakeholder approach and really appreciate that the report takes a very clear-eyed view. We hear a lot about multi-stakeholder partnerships in the context of the SCGs across sectors across goal areas in the area of financing and to be sure in the area of data but it's tricky it's very very tricky particularly when it comes to issues of privacy issues of ownership issues of interoperability which is just a technical way of saying how to get data to talk to each other and it's difficult but it's absolutely essential and so it's one of the things that the global partnership exists to support. The global partnership is a network of now over 275 actors and entities. Members of the global partnership include governments such as the government of Ghana but we're very proud to have Ghana as a member of the global partnership. Many many companies large and small many civil society organizations and international organizations and many academic and philanthropic groups and it's the contribution of all these actors coming together bringing their different perspectives of how they support and engage and can provide data to foster unique collaborations that can drive innovation ways in which governments can work with companies to unlock data to get access to new software and technology ways in which public and private sector can work with citizen groups as Jessica was describing this new and burgeoning area of citizen generated data to really generate more meeting around the data and information we need to inform decision-making not just on the back end for monitoring asking how are we doing and having data that might be out of date by one two three five and ten years but the data we need now today to know if the programs and policies we have in place are actually working are the health clinics sufficiently stopped with medicines are they reaching the people in the community are the schools actually are the teachers showing up at schools there is data and information that can be fed into the system to know if the policies and programs in place and if the resources are being directed in the right places to achieve our goals so this point about multi-stakeholder engagement and this point about the data that's needed now looking to the future and for monitoring is incredibly important another point that I want to make though about multi-stakeholder engagement and this is very much at the heart of what we do in the global partnership is when we're working with governments to look at what a multi-stakeholder approach means at the country level to put the data systems in place that are needed is it's not just across sectors looking at private sector civil society government and others it's also the cross government dimensions one of the things that we see is that the national statistics offices which we tend to focus on when we talk about data are not necessarily able for a range of reasons to work with the different line ministries to share data and to collaborate across government I think there's a lot more work to be done in that area which is why I'm really looking forward to hearing our colleague from the Ghana Health Service and really salute you for joining us today because that the relationship across the health sector and the national statistics office and all the other sectors is incredibly important. There is one point I would like to raise because I think that questions already came is the idea that generating data from citizens this can put at risk people's privacy which is indeed a big risk this is why we need the principles applied also by non-statisticians while the statistical offices are in general safe space but of course more you bring together data from different sources more let's say the the privacy is at risk especially in countries and I will would like to ask you also a question so I heard that in the global partnership some solutions have been developed right yeah so absolutely so this new area of citizen generated data but really all these areas raises big privacy concerns we actually have a group of partners many of whom are working at the grassroots level and been using different methods of generating data from citizens they're coming together to document their methodologies to collect use cases and to work towards some principles and standards to ensure that the level of robustness and certainty we have around official statistics can also be applied to citizen generated data to make it useful and defensible thank you Anthony what is the situation in your country yeah the situation might thank you very much the situation in my country is that we work together this interceptorial collaboration between the minister of communication minister of health the vice president office is also steering all distance and we meet together we are using the laws in the country we have data protection laws minister of health also have sat down and we've come out of a data protection for our patients because we deal with patients so it's very important that we protect the patients and we protect ourselves as well so that was that's what we are doing and how do you see this data revolution and the recommendations of the report applicable to your country and other developing country in africa yeah we look in health we look at how what can you do to take advantage of the data revolution so for the past few years we said we should use appropriate technology in Ghana what we realized is that in 1992 about 190 000 people were subscribers of a mobile phone as i speak now about 35 million subscribers if at every child born in Ghana we have a mobile phone by now so we took advantage of that let's go into mobile health and use the low lowest level that is a community health workers train them how to collect data onto mobile phones and then trans they are also supervised by the community health officers which are the trained nurses who are also supervised by the health information officers and technical officers who who know data and then it fits into the system which you call the district health management information management systems so it's a seamless system and we've taken advantage of that train took one region in Ashanti region trained about 20 of the district officers about now we have our 1800 people who have been trained to collect data at the community level so they are collecting data for disease control disease surveillance and also clinical data and are supervised by the community health workers and they send it to the sub district level goes to the district level and comes to a national level so we are having a timely data that we can use for decision making and that's the advantage that we have taken and so doing we have also moved forward so why don't you also do tele-consortation and luckily the same Ashanti region that was worked down by Millennium Promise and people are consulting and the community health worker can now send the data that he has collected if the patient is sick to the next level and then there's consultation and back consultation to the level and we've taken advantage say look let's go into telemedicine so as we speak now we have five centers or six centers where we have tele-consortation and we have also gone forward again to take one region 26 facilities from the teaching hospital up to the lowest level which is the chief center which is the community based health planning service that's the lowest level and now we are doing the pilot to find out how we can move seamlessly from the lowest level to the highest level there are two things that we are doing we are trying to achieve the universal health coverage but not only achieving the health coverage but achieving quality health coverage for the whole people of the country and that's exactly what we are using data for we've taken advantage of data revolution in the world to make sure that we give quality services to the people of the country so I think that this is a great example of using data to make sustainable development happening and not only to produce statistics to monitor where we are going well there are several questions that we received but unfortunately we have to close this session I think that we hope that now you will take a look at the report that which is available of course on the sdsn website and spread it in your networks and contribute to the work of the global partnership sdsn and the other bodies who are committed to make the data revolution one of the fundamental engines to reach out the sdgs thank you very much