Joined-up Data Standards

Data has immense potential to help drive poverty eradication and sustainable development. It can enable a better understanding of development challenges and the policies needed to address them. However, while more and more data is becoming available, the vital information it holds often remains inaccessible because it is being published in different formats or standards. People can see snapshots of what is going on, but not the whole picture. Existing and future data standards need to be able to join up.

Watch this short presentation to learn more:

Development Initiatives and Publish What You Fund are working together to make this happen by focusing on two things – technical solutions and political will. Joined-up data will help both decision-makers and those holding them to account to have the crucial information they need. This information can support better decision making to drive poverty eradication, sustainable development and to respond effectively to crises.

Our research to date leads us to make three clear recommendations:

• New standards must be created with joined-up thinking from the start.
• We need joined-up leadership: standard setters from different organisations and governments must work together on this issue.
• We urgently need technical translation services to read between machines and formats to meet the ambitions of the 2030 development agenda.

This project runs from August 2015 to December 2017.

Funders

Partners