Background
Papua New Guinea will present its second Voluntary National Review (VNR) at the United Nations High-level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development in July 2025, seeking to capture the country’s progress and challenges in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The evidence-based analysis required by the VNR depends on high-quality SDG data to track the progress of SDGs.
Under the Joint SDG Fund project “Strengthening monitoring and financing capacity to accelerate the implementation of the SDGs and national priorities,” ESCAP has partnered with UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Resident Coordinator’s Office (UN-RCO) to support the government of Papua New Guinea in tracking national priorities aligned with the SDGs and the six transition areas, including strengthening SDG monitoring capacity, localization of SDG indicators, and the development of an SDG dashboard.
Objectives
The work aimed to convene key stakeholders to discuss an inclusive approach to producing, sharing, and using SDG data for monitoring national priorities. The main objectives were:
- Understand the SDG indicator landscape: Discuss how SDG data is produced and the roles of different stakeholders (e.g., government agencies, civil society, academia, international organizations) in the data lifecycle.
- Explore the elements of an SDG dashboard: Examine the approaches to measuring SDG progress, setting target values, summarizing results at indicator, target, and goal levels, and utilizing dashboards in the VNR process.
- Strengthen national SDG data coordination: Develop a plan for improved data sharing coordination, ensuring that stakeholders have clear roles in the SDG monitoring processes.