The technical seminar “Innovative data for policy formulation” was held on 6 September at the General Statistical Office (GSO), the Vietnamese national statistics agency, as part of the “Data for now” initiative co-financed by Italy and created by UNSD, Statistics Division of the United Nations Agency for Social and Economic Affairs (UNDESA).
In recent years, catastrophic events such as the COVID 19 pandemic or natural disasters caused by climate change have led governments to formulate and implement policies in a timely manner; policies that require multidimensional analysis of inclusive, accurate, disaggregated and up-to-date data. To meet this need, traditional data collection methods, such as the census, are increasingly supported by “innovative” methods, big data, such as satellite images and geolocation data.
The Data for Now initiative, launched by United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2019, was created to support national statistical institutes, ministries and agencies in partner countries Governments engaged in statistical work in their analysis and production of up-to-date and reliable data to monitor progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. In October 2021, Italy approved a contribution of 1,275 MEURO to support the initiative in 8 African and Asian countries: Ethiopia, Morocco, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Tunisia, Jordan, Pakistan and Vietnam. During the GSO workshop, UNSD, together with major donors in Vietnam active in the field of statistical capacity building Italy, the World Bank and Germany, discussed the main areas where the Vietnamese government needs technical assistance for the identification of innovative indicators to in order to formulate effective policies to achieve sustainable development goals and leave no one behind.
Italy has been active for several years in the sector of strengthening statistical capacities in the country; the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2014 to consolidate cooperation with its Vietnamese counterpart, providing technical assistance and sharing statistical methodologies and best practices. Furthermore, in 2018 the “Improvement of the statistical sector” project was launched with the aim of strengthening the GSO for the production of data on energy and climate change, for the dissemination of statistical data and to improve the ICT system. Thanks to this contribution, strongly appreciated by the GSO, notable results have been achieved, among which it is worth mentioning that in August 2021 the first Country report on energy was compiled and sent according to the standards of the United Nations and the Oslo Group, bridging a gap that saw Vietnam as one of the few non-compliant countries.