The Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, said today at a meeting in New York that the tectonic changes the world is undergoing demand greater collaboration between the public and private sectors and civil society for data production and use, as well as the exploration of other methods and perspectives for measuring and understanding economic, social and environmental realities and their interrelationship.
While attending the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, ECLAC’s most senior representative participated in a side event on “New Tools To Harness the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development,” held at the headquarters of the Ford Foundation and organized by the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, jointly with the Governments of Colombia, the Philippines, Sierra Leone and the United States.
Alicia Bárcena was a panelist in a segment of the debate along with Shamshad Akhtar, Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), and Giovanie Biha, Deputy Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). The panel was moderated by Sanjeev Khagram, Coordinator of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data.
“Leaving no one behind means that no one should be invisible. We must make everyone visible for a world that counts,” said ECLAC’s Executive Secretary, in reference to the motto of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and to the title of a document in which she and some twenty other experts, at the request of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, analyzed some key actions to fuel the data revolution.
In light of the extraordinary transformations affecting the world, Bárcena said that we must reflect on what should be measured in order to unravel the links between education, work, productivity, technology and other factors. In that sense, she noted that the public sector, through its national statistics systems, and the private sector and civil society, which accumulate big data, can collaborate to process and put relevant information at the service of development.
In the case of ECLAC, the Executive Secretary indicated that the organization offers an analytical framework for the 2030 Agenda, condensed in the document Horizons 2030: Equality at the Centre of Sustainable Development. This text proposes global collective action, betting on the incorporation of knowledge and innovation in production, and a big environmental push that includes investments focused on counteracting climate change.
Additionally, Alicia Bárcena said, ECLAC promotes the consolidation of a regional institutional architecture through the new Forum of the Countries of Latin America and the Caribbean on Sustainable Development (a regional mechanism for review and follow-up of the 2030 Agenda), and through its subsidiary bodies, dedicated to areas such as statistics, planning, gender, and science and technology, among others.
The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data is a multi-sectoral global network of international organizations, governments, companies, non-governmental organizations and statistics communities that collaborate with the aim of improving statistical capacities and the use of data, promoting their openness and availability, and filling information gaps to support the efforts underway to move towards sustainable development.
This activity was organized as a side event to the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, which is taking place in New York from July 11 to July 20. The Forum is the intergovernmental mechanism that will provide follow-up on implementation of the 2030 Agenda at a global level. It was convened exceptionally in 2013 and 2014 and, from now on, it will meet every year.
