UNDP Namibia SDG Monitoring Tool

The UNDP NAMIBIA SDG Monitoring Tool

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), more specifically 17 Global Goals, are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity. They provide clear guidelines and targets for all countries to adopt in accordance with their own priorities and the environmental challenges of the world at large. The UNDP, as the lead UN development agency, is uniquely placed to help implement the Goals through their work in some 170 countries and territories. [Source http://www.undp.org]

In July 2017, SASSCAL and the UNDP in Namibia signed an MoU at the UN House in Windhoek, Namibia. A first joint initiative of this collaboration is the joint development of a monitoring tool for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) defined by the United Nations.

Implemented by the OADC (Open Access Data Centre), the specific and immediate objectives of SASSCAL’s support to the UNDP are

• to develop a data portal that will enable the UN to monitor the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the associated indicators as well as other relevant information in Namibia and
• to provide data processing services to the UN to ensure that data summaries that are relevant for the monitoring of age, gender, income status etc. at the national, regional and constituency level.

The UNDP Namibia Data Portal (working title) is currently being developed and implemented using Namibian data from the UN Stats platform (https://unstats.un.org/). The UNDP office is engaging with the respective Namibian authorities to collect the data on the SDGs allowing for the integration of updated data and for a disaggregation of relevant SDG indicators by administrative units.

The platform will be provided as an online tool, without the need for authentication when viewing any of the data. The client interface for the platform is built using the Angular 4 framework, whilst the data is stored in a Mongo Document database via a NodeJS service. Provision has been made to allow for UNDP staff to upload statistics data using either Excel or comma delimited format and to consequently automatically aggregate and extract data from the database, in order to facilitate the updating of graphs.

All tools used to develop this platform are Open source and free for use.

Even though the current system represents only national and single SDG indicators for Namibia as a whole, it is foreseen to also represent spatially disaggregated data, once this has been made available by the national authorities. It is foreseen that in the future this system will be developed to enable the processing of complex data systems, i.e. the integration with additional socio-economic (e.g. road distance) and environmental (e.g. climate data) as needed. Furthermore, functionalities will allow for the download of reports and the inclusion of data from countries beyond Namibia. Given its generic design, the platform can be easily adapted and transferred to other SADC countries and support them in monitoring and assessing the SDG implementation.