Report on briefing on work of IAEG for members of ECOSOC

In introducing the briefing the President of ECOSOC said that the Global Indicator Framework is one of the most important tools to support SDGs implementation. It will be adopted by the ECOSOC and General Assembly following the IAEG’s technical recommendations being agreed in the Statistical Commission, in line with existing mandates. ECOSOC will take action on the indicators as quickly as possible. 

Stefan Schweinfest, Director of the Statistical Commission, said that to ensure technical integrity of the indicators, the Statistical Commission is overseeing the development of the indicators and that they will hand the process back to the political level.

IAEG has worked intensively as “double ambassadors”. It comprises 28 Chief Statisticians and they have reached out nationally to all relevant agencies in-country while acting as ambassadors at the sub-regional level, representing a group of countries. Therefore the process is the “best of both worlds”. The IAEG has stuck closely to the General Assembly rules in proposing an indicator for each single target and specific population groups. It also stuck to the timeframe for making its proposal to Statistical Commission. The process details are included in the document before the Commission. There have been several rounds of consultations and by December there were only green and grey indicators, with colours used as a means to organize work. This colour coding is now extinct and only green indicators are left.

In December there were still some 80 grey indicators (which are included in Addendum IV). (See: IAEG-SDGs revised report issued with the “final” list of indicators) In total there are 231 indicators covering the entire spectrum. The IAEG carried out four rounds of consultations led by co-chairs, who could work round the clock as one was always awake.  General agreement was reached (ref to doc), with a small caveat that five indicators under four targets have been identified as relating to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and, as there is an open working mechanism underway, there is a footnote relating to this process. They are place-holders in the indicator framework now.

IAEG will not cease to exist. It has a mandate to work over the next 15 years and will now move to the implementation phase, which is critical. The indicators are being classified in three tiers:

Tier 1: Those for which established methodology exists and data is widely available, eg legacy from MDGs

Tier 2: Methodology established, but for which data is not available

Tier 3: Agreed methodology has not been agreed yet

IAEG will meet again at the end of March. There is a general proposal that it continues work on ‘tier classification’. There will be further discussion on interlinkages. 

Schweinfest also referred to the involvement of civil society. He said that they had made over 600 submissions that were all carefully reviewed during the several open consultations. There was some concern from civil society colleagues that their proposals had not taken fully into account and they had made a request to extend consultations.

He referred to the distinction between global and national indicators. The global indicators were to inform the work of the HLPF. There would also be regional level indicators as well as national level on what is relevant at the national level, including additional national indicators relevant to the country concerned. Disaggregation is challenging for statistics as it requires detailed information makes each indicator a “family of indicators”. Capacity-building will be necessary. 

As far as the next steps are concerned, the Statistics Commission will take action during its session and then hand over to ECOSOC, as included in the 2030 agenda. He hopes there will be a great deal of communication between the Statistical community and delegations here for ECOSOC, which should reach out to Chief Statisticians.

Questions and comments were then taken from the floor including on the process for the ‘tiers’ and also by Nigeria who asked for clarity on the concerns of civil society He wanted to know what their actual concern was and how did the committee arrive at considering extending the meeting to accommodate them as the process is meant to be run by Member States and why should civil society appear to be controlling the process. In answer to this particular question Schweinfest reiterated that the Member States were in charge of process through IAEG. They took all final decisions and defining agenda, which was done in an open transparent manner. Expert groups made decisions as to what was acceptable. Some civil society members were not necessarily satisfied that their specific proposals were not taken into account. He would also be having a briefing for civil society.