The adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development reaffirmed the need for strengthened statistical capacity of developing countries. In this case, strengthened statistical capacity was needed to measure, monitor and report on the Sustainable Development Goals in an accurate, reliable and timely manner for evidence-based policymaking. The Programme on Statistics and Data was developed in response to this need and brought together all 10 implementing entities of the Development Account in a joint effort to strengthen the national statistical systems of the programme’s beneficiary countries. The Programme capitalized on the comparative advantages of the implementing entities and leveraged significant financial and in-kind support from external bilateral and multilateral partners such as the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the European Union, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Labour Organization (ILO) and regional development banks. The Programme supported numerous high-level capacity building initiatives to enhance the capacity of target countries to launch or improve institutional mechanisms and procedures, at national and local levels, for the production and utilization of Sustainable Development Goal indicators.

Several hundred activities, including country advisory missions, were executed during the implementation of the Programme, covering over 130 countries, including 37 least developed countries. Country-level outcomes of the Programme include modernization of statistical systems, updating of statistics acts, and adoption of new statistical frameworks. Regionally, project outcomes include e-learning on environment statistics in Africa, advancement of gender statistics, improvement of poverty measurement in Latin America, and building of skills for trade statistics in the Caribbean.

Other achievements include production of digital guidelines and training materials to support developing countries’ response to data demands created by the 2030 Agenda and enhancement of developing countries’ capacity to strengthen the legal, institutional and organizational environments in which statistical authorities operate.

The Programme established a collaborative to support countries in their efforts to increase usage of administrative data for statistical purposes, which allows low- and middle-income countries to benefit from experiences of more developed countries and international agencies. Countries also benefit from a self-assessment tool for evaluating their legal frameworks’ readiness to support access to administrative data.

The Programme supported implementation of the Global Network of Institutions for Statistical Training (GIST) to improve coordination of statistical training and increase understanding of official statistics so as to better address needs of both national statistical offices and the wider statistical system. It also supported the creation of the Global Network of Data Officers and Statisticians to enable efficient and effective collaboration in supporting national Governments in their efforts to achieve full implementation of the 2030 Agenda and review and report on the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Programme focused on making global Sustainable Development Goals-related data more visible by presenting the progress of the Goals in a user friendly format, including a new interface for the global Sustainable Development Goals indicators database; a single landing page for all Sustainable Development Goals data and related information; a new Sustainable Development Goals analytics component illustrating data availability, which includes disaggregated data allowing users to compare trends across areas and indicators; and global Sustainable Development Goals metadata available in a machine-readable format which can be computer-processed.

Following the COVID-19 outbreak, all remaining Programme outputs were reprogrammed to encompass COVID-19 resilience and response activities. The COVID-19 response activities included identifying good practices for handling innovative data sources in order to address emerging data needs related to COVID-19 response and recovery policy; creating a COVID-19 response web portal for sharing guidance, actions, tools and best practices so as to ensure operational continuity of data programmes at national level; and establishing a United Nations COVID-19 data hub, making data relevant to the COVID-19 response and suitable for map making, data visualization and analysis readily available.

To assess pandemic readiness of the world’s cities and how they have coped with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Programme developed a COVID-19 readiness and response tracker. The tracker scores readiness and responsiveness on a scale of 0–100 based on more than 50 weighted, normalized indicators and provides critical information needed to inform resilience, response and recovery strategies. The web-based tracker scores over 1,200 cities with a population of 500,000+.