In September 2015, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, along with a set of seventeen new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), were adopted by 193 Member States of the United Nations. The Agenda represents a call for action to end poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere. The SDG ambition of leaving no one behind has been translated into an ambitious indicator framework that requires timely, high quality and disaggregated statistics for monitoring. It poses an opportunity to revisit the data ecosystem and to encourage collaboration between all producers of data, among which are national statistical offices, UN agencies, aligned ministries, civil society organizations, and it stimulates the production of new more granular data using non-traditional sources.
In 2018, the Arab Development Portal launched the first regional SDGs Tracking Tool, giving users concerned with development trajectories in Arab countries access to an SDGs database of 7,800 indicators and a facility that generates automated reports on progress towards SDG targets within the framework of the global list of indicators. The visualization and reporting facility also provides concise information on data availability disaggregated by country, goal, indicator and tier.
“Mind the Gap: SDG Data Availability and Gaps in the Arab Region” is a visualization dashboard developed in 2022 by the Arab Development Portal - UNDP. It aims to provide a snapshot of the capacity of Arab countries to report on the global list of SDG indicators as suggested by the Inter-agency and Expert Group (IAEG). By restricting reporting to publicly available data, the dashboard also highlights efforts not only to produce more data but to disseminate data to the public as part of countries’ efforts to facilitate access to information on SDGs.
Throughout the dashboard, SDG data availability is calculated based on the global list of 247 indicators as the common benchmark for all Arab countries. This list is published by the Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators, and it offers a common denominator for cross-country comparison when assessing data availability at the level of all 17 SDGs. The dashboard focuses on nationally produced data, taking into consideration the metadata files of the UN Statistics Division on SDG indicators. It tracks data that are publicly available and can be extracted from the official websites of ministries and national statistical offices and/or that have been published in Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs). This might penalize data availability in countries that have produced the data but did not share it in public, due to the limited dissemination capacity in some Arab countries. But by focusing on what is produced and published rather than what is only produced, the dashboard acknowledges countries’ efforts to disseminate data and enhance access to official statistics.
At the level of all the goals, the dashboard looks into data availability at the level of the indicator first and considers data available if a respective country has published at least one data point between 2010 and 2020. This takes into consideration disaggregated data and accounts for data availability at the level of main indicators or the descendants. For example, there are 16 indicators under Goal 8, if at least one data point is available for the disaggregated indicator female unemployment rate which falls under the main indicator “8.5.2 Unemployment rate, by sex, age and persons with disabilities”, then data for the main indicator is considered available. As such, if data are available for 5 indicators (at least one data point per indicator or per disaggregated sub-indicator) under Goal 8, data availability (%) will amount to 5/16=31.25%.
The same methodology applies when measuring the overall level of availability. For example, if for a specific country, data are available for 50 indicators (at least one data point per indicator or per disaggregated sub-indicator), then the overall data availability for the country is 20.24% (50/247=20.24%).
The metadata files of the official list of indicators published by the UN Statistics Division stipulate the provision of disaggregated data under each main indicator. The SDGs data agenda is considered revolutionary in nature because it commits to leaving no one behind – statistically – and capturing the lives of people and societies under various conditions. As such, tracking disaggregated data is essential to forming a holistic evaluation of progress towards the SDGs.
While the SDGs list of global indicators includes sixty-four different categories of disaggregation, the dashboard only tracks data availability based on four categories: sex, age group, education level and disability. “Sex” is a required disaggregation level for 79 main indicators, age for 72 main indicators, persons with disability for 22 main indicators and education for 17 main indicators. Again, the dashboard considers data for a specific disaggregation level to be available if at least one data point has been recorded between 2010 and 2020.
The dashboard consists of three chapters, where users can explore interactive visualizations that relate to various aspects of data availability in the Arab region, in line with the methodology presented. It offers users consolidated information on the ability of Arab countries to report on the SDGs and data availability at the goal, indicator and disaggregation levels. It highlights cross-country comparisons and data deficiency across specific groups, thus shedding the light on groups who are overlooked or fall through the cracks of a data ecosystem that remains far from being inclusive despite significant improvements by many countries.
Chapter 1 offers an interactive visualization showing data availability per goal and for all goals of the Arab countries. Each goal is represented by a colored bubble, whereby the size of the bubble is proportional to the data availability level. The white horizontal line shows data availability for each country across all 17 SDGs. When clicking on the bubble, the user will have access to the list of indicators that are reported on under this goal for the respective country, highlighting the indicators for which data is available. When selecting a specific SDG, the dashboard will showcase data availability for that goal across all countries, in addition to the median average of this goal in terms of data availability.
Chapter 2 presents an interactive table that highlights data availability by country for each indicator that should be reported on as per one of the disaggregation levels covered by this dashboard, i.e. by sex, age, education and disability. Users can select the desired disaggregation level and the table will list for each SDG indicator the following outcomes:
Chapter 3 offers users an instant snapshot of the timeliness of disaggregated data by goal for each Arab country. The chart displays the concentration of SDG indicators’ data points and hence data gaps for each country since 1990, clearly showing how the SDGs data agenda has contributed to increased production by official sources. The user can select a goal from the drop-down menu to visualize the respective number of data points per year for each country. At the country level, the size of the bubble represents the number of available data points per year for the selected goal taking into account all of its indicators and their available disaggregated data; the more the country has reported on disaggregated data in a certain year, the higher the number of data points, and this will translate in a bigger bubble.
| Country | Source |
| Algeria | Institut National de la Sante Publique; Ministère de la Sante, de la Population et de la reforme hospitalière |
| Algeria | Ministère de la formation et de l'enseignement professionnels |
| Algeria | National Statistical Office (ONS) |
| Algeria | Voluntary National Review |
| Bahrain | Information and eGovernment Authority, Bahrain Open Data Portal |
| Comoros | Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques et Démographiques (INSEED) |
| Comoros | General Secretariat of the Government - General Planning Commission |
| Djibouti | Institut National de la Statistique INSD |
| Djibouti | Open Data for Africa, Djibouti Data Portal |
| Egypt | Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) |
| Egypt | Ministry of Finance |
| Egypt | Ministry of Health and Population and El-Zanaty and Associates |
| Egypt | Ministry of Health and Population, National Population Council, El-Zanaty and Associates, and ORC Macro |
| Egypt | Ministry of Planning and Economic Development |
| Iraq | Central Statistical Organization (CSO) |
| Jordan | Department of Statistics (DOS) |
| Jordan | Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (MEMR) |
| Kuwait | Central Statistical Bureau (CSB) |
| Kuwait | Voluntary National Review 2019 |
| Lebanon | Central Administration of Statistics (CAS) |
| Lebanon | Voluntary National Review (VNR) on SDGs |
| Lebanon | Ministry of Public Health, Lebanon |
| Libya | Bureau of Statistics and Census (BSC) |
| Libya | The first National Voluntary Review Report (VNR) on the SDGs |
| Mauritania | Strategy for Accelerated Growth and Shared Prosperity |
| Mauritania | Ministry of Health |
| Mauritania | National Agency for Statistics, Demographic and Economic Analysis (ANSADE) |
| Morocco | Haut Commissariat au Plan (HCP) |
| Morocco | Ministry of Health |
| Morocco | Voluntary National Review (VNR) 2020 |
| Oman | National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI) |
| Palestine | Palestine Monetary Authority |
| Palestine | Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics |
| Qatar | Planning and Statistics Authority |
| Saudi Arabia | Communications and Information Technology Commission |
| Saudi Arabia | General Authority for Statistics |
| Saudi Arabia | Ministry of Health |
| Somalia | Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation |
| Somalia | National Bureau of Statistics |
| Somalia | The Somali Health and Demographic Survey 2020 |
| Sudan | Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) |
| Sudan | Federal Ministry of Health |
| Syria | Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) |
| Syria | Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation Commission |
| Tunisia | Ministry of Communication Technologies |
| Tunisia | Ministry of Education |
| Tunisia | Ministry of Health |
| Tunisia | National Institute of Statistics (INS) |
| Tunisia | Voluntary National Review |
| UAE | Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Authority (FCSA), The UAE portal for the Sustainable Development Goals |
| UAE | Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Authority (FCSA) |
| Yemen | Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) |
| Yemen | Ministry of Agriculture, Yemen; Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) |
| Yemen | Ministry of Public Health and Population |
An economist by training with an MSc in Development Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London, Farah has sixteen years of experience working with leading research centers and development agencies. She has been working at UNDP since 2010 on issues that relate to SDGs, economic development and governance. She is the Project Manager and Technical Specialist of the Arab Development Portal at UNDP Regional Bureau for Arab States. Choucair has co-led the design and implementation of various multidisciplinary research models and analytical tools and contributed to leveraging big data to produce research and data on complex development topics such as social cohesion, hate speech, core grievances and trust.
Layal has been affiliated with UNDP (Regional Bureau of Arab States) since 2013 and has worked on the design and expansion of the Portal since its inception. She has been leading the Visualize 2030 initiative, the first SDGs data camp in the Arab Region, since 2017. Layal holds an MSc in Financial Economics from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and has twelve years of experience conducting socio-economic research on the Arab region and five years of experience working in the academia, mainly at AUB.
Yasser has more than eighteen years of experience working with UNDP, ESCWA and the National Statistical Office of Lebanon (CAS). He has extensive experience in developing and managing statistical and metadata databases on socio-economic topics and the SDGs; database liaison support and statistical infographics.
Yasmine holds an MSc in Economics from the American University of Beirut (AUB), with ten years of experience conducting socio-economic and statistical research on the Arab Region. She joined the ADP Project since its inception phase and has been affiliated with UNDP (Regional Bureau of Arab States) since 2013, coordinating the work of the portal with Arab National Statistical Offices. Prior to joining UNDP, she worked in the academia and as a researcher at the Institute of Financial Economics at AUB.
Joya joined UNDP RBAS in 2019, conducting statistical analysis on key development topics, compiling and updating data, overviews and statistical snapshots.
Rasha joined UNDP RBAS in 2020, working on updating, compiling and visualizing data on social and economic topics in Arab countries.She holds a BA in Economics from Saint Joseph University (USJ).