Cost of gathering data on new development goals could be crippling

When we think about the next development agenda, our focus is usually on the goals and targets themselves. But we don’t often think about how much it will take to measure our progress. Clearly this is important, because there’s limited value in setting goals and targets if we can’t measure them because it’s just too costly or difficult to do so.

Right now the UN is making a lot of noise about a ‘data revolution’ where every imaginable development indicator will not only be measurable, accurate and timely but also disaggregated by gender, income, region, village. This is so important that Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, just set up a 24 person special advisory council including Robin Li, the CEO of Chinese search engine Baidu, to provide recommendations on the data revolution.

When even measuring GDP properly is a challenge for developing countries, how much will it cost to get up to this level? More than a quarter of a trillion dollars.

That’s what the latest paper from Copenhagen Consensus estimates for a data revolution to measure the UN’s vertiginous proposal of 17 goals and 169 targets for fifteen years. $250 billion is almost two times the annual foreign aid budget, and equates to spending 12.5% per year just on measurement. To put this in perspective UK and Norway spend 0.2% of GDP on statistics.

The cost of proper data for 169 targets for the SDGs is so expensive, we have to cut them down dramatically and find the smartest targets. If we are willing to spend as much as UK and Norway on good data we should prioritize four targets.