On behalf of Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Ms Saadiya Razzaq highlighted the commitments of SDPI for SDGs data in Pakistan in her speech at the UNGA Side event on Commit, Collaborate, Celebrate: 1 Year of Harnessing the Data Revolution for the Global Sustainable Development Goals, on 21 September, 2016.

1. Open Data for SDGs along with Mapping and Meta-data

Pakistan Data Portal at SDPI will host the SDGs data to be used for evidence based policy making and monitoring of SDGs. Portal will provide the mapping of sources and definitions along with the linked data as per indicator dictionary.

Pakistan Data Portal phase II is near completion, is live on staging server and will be launched soon. The key features of the portal include data availability, data interactivity and data visualization. PDP is one the advanced open data portals of world having 4 Star rating according to Open Data Portal rating. It has one of the most advanced Indicator Dictionary in the world with three steps of Indicator meta-data for more organized quality control of data attached to the indicator. PDP has rationally linked data features on the basis of an advanced Indicator Dictionary. It also allows user to dynamically query data and pool the information from all the datasets from all the years into single dataset. Users can then perform further analysis on the queried data. It also has additional features for data visualization and data analysis.

2. Establishing the Pakistan Data Forum to Standardize the Data

SDPI through PDP is under the process of establishing the Pakistan Data Forum (PDF) to facilitate and build the capacity of stakeholders for the standardization, production and timely use of data to promote and track the progress on SDGs.

To address the issue of availability of quality data which is a policy concern in terms of SDGs; SDPI extended the coordination and collaboration with Adam Smith International (as a first step for education sector and will expand in future for other sectors) towards the establishment of Pakistan Data Forum. The objective of PDF is to address the issues like validity and quality of data, coverage in terms of geographical areas, methodologies to collect data, level of disaggregation, standardization and comparability of data across different sources & years as these are some of the major concerns related to data in Pakistan. In this regard discussions are taking place and a tentative work plan has been agreed. The output of the forum will be a data manual for SDGs.

3. Utilization and Dissemination of Citizen Generated Data

Pakistan Data Portal (PDP) is in process of building an interactive online community forum to engage citizens to provide data on SDGs with respect to their communities which will be then analyzed and disseminated.

The aim is to collect data for SDGs from community which will not only enhance the awareness about SDGs but the citizens would also be able to monitor the progress in their respective communities and provide the feedback.

The community forum will provide the data from national level, down to community level. It would be open data and disseminated through dashboards. The information provided by public will be analyzed for each SDG target and indicator. The data will be collected through portal based surveys – which will also be available through mobile app- and social media surveys. The data then will be analyzed and disseminated through maps and graphs on the portal.

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