Noticia
El Instituto de Estadística y Cartografía de Andalucía (IECA), in collaboration with the Andalusian Agency for International Development Cooperation (AACID), has incorporated new indicators at the municipal level into its Sustainable Development Indicators System for Andalusia for the Agenda 2030. This effort aims to integrate statistical and geographical information while enhancing the efficiency of the Andalusian public administration and the information services provided to society.
Thanks to these efforts, Andalusia has been selected as one of the participating regions in the European project "REGIONS 2030: Monitoring the SDGs in EU regions," along with nine other regions in the European Union. All of these regions share a strong commitment to the analysis and fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), recognizing the importance of this work in decision-making and sustainable regional development.
The "REGIONS 2030" project, funded by the European Parliament and developed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission in collaboration with the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO) and EUROSTAT, aims to fill data gaps in monitoring the SDGs in EU regions.
Image 1: "REGIONS 2030" Project: Monitoring the SDGs in EU regions.
Source: Andalusian Institute of Statistics and Cartography (IECA)
The new indicators incorporated are essential for measuring the progress of the SDGs
The Andalusian Institute of Statistics and Cartography, in collaboration with AACID, has created a set of indicators that allow for evaluating the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals at the regional level, available on their website. All the new municipal-level indicators are identified with the Joint Research Centre (municipal) for Andalusia, and they address 9 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
The methodology used for most of the indicators is based on georeferenced information from the Andalusian Institute of Statistics and Cartography, using publications on the Spatial Distribution of the Population in Andalusia and the Characterization and Distribution of Built Space in Andalusia as reference points.
One of the indicators provides information on Goal 1: No Poverty and measures the risks of poverty by assessing the percentage of people residing at an address where none of their members are affiliated with Social Security. This indicator reveals more unfavorable conditions in urban municipalities compared to rural ones, consistent with previous studies that identify cities as having more acute poverty situations than rural areas.
Similarly, the per capita Built-up Area indicator for Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities has been calculated using cadastral data and geospatial processes in geographic information systems.
Visualization and query of the new municipal indicators
Allow for obtaining information at the municipal level about the value and variation of the indicators compared to the previous year, both for the entire Andalusia region and different degrees of urbanization.
Image 2: Data visualization of the indicator.
Source: Andalusian Institute of Statistics and Cartography (IECA)
Moreover, the applied filter enables an analysis of the temporal and geographical evolution of the indicators in each of the considered areas, providing a temporal and territorial perspective.
Image 3: Visualization of the indicator's evolution by area.
Source: Andalusian Institute of Statistics and Cartography (IECA)
These results are presented through an interactive map at the municipal level, displaying the distribution of the indicator in the territory.
Image 4: Interactive map of the indicator.
Source: Andalusian Institute of Statistics and Cartography (IECA)
The data for the indicators are also available in downloadable structured formats (XLS, CSV, and JSON). Methodological information regarding the calculations for each indicator is provided as well.
The inclusion of Andalusia in the "REGIONS 2030" project
Has integrated all of this work with the existing Sustainable Development Indicators System for Andalusia for the Agenda 2030, which has been calculated and published by the IECA to date. This collective effort among different regions will serve to establish a methodology and select the most relevant regional indicators in Europe (NUTS2 European level) so that this methodology can be applied to all European regions in the future.
The "REGIONS 2030" project, after completing its initial work in Andalusia, has disseminated its results in the article "Monitoring the SDGs in Andalusia region, Spain," published by the European Commission in July 2023, and in an event held at the Three Cultures Foundation of the Mediterranean on September 27, under the title 'SDG Localisation and Monitoring Framework for 2030 Agenda Governance: Milestones & Challenges in Andalusia.' In this event, each selected region presented their results and discussed the needs, deficiencies, or lessons learned in generating their reports.
The "REGIONS 2030" project will conclude in December 2023 with the presentation and publication of a final report. This report will consolidate the ten regional reports generated during the monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals at the regional level in Europe, contributing to their effective monitoring as part of the proper implementation of the Agenda 2030.
Noticia
More than half of the world's population are women, who also play a key role in our society. For example, it is women who grow, produce and sell more than 90% of locally grown food. Paradoxically, these same women are beneficiaries of only 1% of agricultural loans and receive less than 1% of public contracts. One of the reasons for this growing discrimination is precisely the scarcity of the availability of the gender data required to adequately evaluate public policies and ensure that women are included and their particular needs taken into account.
As we see, far from taking advantage of the benefits promised by open data and appart from suffering the usual discrimination due to gender issues, women around the world are now also forced to live a new form of discrimination through the data: women have less online presence than men; they are generally less likely to be heard in the consultation and design phase of data policies; they are less valued in the rankings of data scientists and usually they do not even have representation in official statistics.
The goals defined through the Sustainable Development Goals include a specific objective to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women. However, even though we already have a great variety of data disaggregated by sex, a recent study by the United Nations has detected the existence of important gender data gaps when dealing with these specific sources of discrimination in such relevant areas such as health, education, economic opportunities, political participation or even one's physical integrity.
Ending discrimination will be a much more difficult task if you do not even have the basic data necessary to understand the extent of the problem to solve it. Therefore, an important first step is to make the most of the already available data, but also be able to clearly visualize these deficiencies. Political commitment at the highest level is very high with initiatives such as the Global Data Alliance for Sustainable Development, the Open Data Charter or the African Consensus on Data, showing their explicit support for more inclusive data policies. Nevertheless, this commitment has not materialized, as even today only 13% of governments include in their budgets the regular collection of gender data.
In order to close this new digital gender gap, a new comprehensive approach will therefore be necessary to identify the necessary data, ensure that this data is collected and shared as open data, conduct training actions so the interested parties can understand and analyze these data by themselves and enable dialogue and participation mechanisms to ensure that public budgets adequately capture these needs.
In an increasingly digital world, without equality of data, we will not be able to understand the totality of the reality about women's life and well-being, nor reach true gender equality to make each and every one of women be taken into account.
Noticia
In August 2014 the Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon asked a group of independent experts to develop specific recommendations on how to carry out a data revolution for sustainable development. In the conclusions of the report prepared by the experts, two global challenges were identified:
- The"invisibility" challenge due to the differences between what we could get to know if we had access to the appropriate data and what we really know given the current lack of data.
- The inequality challenge due to the differences between those who have access to the data that they need to make their own decisions and those who don´t.
Since this report was published, the use and potential of the data has begun to take a special role in the global agenda for sustainable development. Only one year later, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted new and ambitious Sustainable Development Goals, 17 objectives in different policy areas which establish the development agenda for the coming years and include subjects such as poverty, hunger, health, education, gender equality, access to clean water, clean energy, employment, sustainable growth, industry, inequality, responsible consumption, climate change, ecosystem, peace and justice.
This time open data play again an important part in the debate on their role as a development tool, but with a more focused approach to monitoring the progress of the goals. Then there are several voices advocating a more intensive use of open data to promote the development. For example, the report “Open Data for Sustainable Development” by The World Bank also highlights what additional contributions the open data can make to achieve the development goals:
- Promote economic growth and job creation.
- Improve the efficiency and efficacy of public services.
- Promote transparency, accountability and participation of governments.
- Facilitate the information sharing among governmental agencies.
In the end, the role of open data will be critical in order to achieve the new development goals, on the one hand contributing to the definition of necessary data standards, also as a tool to measure the progress and accountability and finally providing the necessary evidence on the real impact obtained. One must ensure that the data revolution is open otherwise there will be no revolution.
To that end the OD4D (Open Data for Development) network, whose main purpose is to activate the potential of open data as a tool for development, contributing not only to the development of the global open data agenda, but also the regional agendas in Africa or Asia for example and also givingsupport to implement them. Thanks to the joint efforts of the network and other initiatives such as the International Open Data Charter, it has been possible to embed the open data principles within the development goals through the Open Data module for sustainable development.
Whether to improve the access to drinking water or the health system, analyze the effectiveness of education systems, promote gender equality, tackle climate change and preserve our forests, open data have been already proving all their potential as a development tool, but to get the most of them we also have to solve first a series of obstacles that hinder the access to the necessary data as the lack of a clear legal and regulatory framework; the new digital gap between rich and poor, both in the data supply and demand; the existence of an organizational culture in some governments that does not promote the openness or the lack of coordination between data supply and demand.