Unlocking the Power of Data Through Cooperation
In today’s world confronted with complex and interlinked development challenges, data is more than just numbers—it is an essential asset and a public good for sustainable development. Recognizing this, South-South and triangular cooperation has emerged as a powerful mechanism for strengthening statistical and data capacities across developing countries. These collaborative efforts facilitate peer learning, knowledge exchange, and digital innovation, enabling developing countries to build robust national data ecosystems that drive evidence-based policymaking. From national-level census modernization to city-to-city smart transportation planning, South-South cooperation is empowering countries to use data to inform policies and improve lives. Let’s explore how this works in practice and what more can be done to scale up its impact.
How Is South-South Cooperation Facilitating Knowledge Sharing and Data Innovation?
National-Level Impact: Strengthening National Statistical Systems With support from the India-UN Development Partnership Fund, Moldova is leveraging experiences from India and Estonia to enhance registry-based census technologies and conduct the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS). These efforts are improving data accuracy, timeliness, and efficiency, ensuring gender-sensitive and evidence-based policymaking.
How Can We Enhance the Impact of South-South Cooperation on Data and Statistical Capacity?
The Pact for the Future and the Global Digital Compact recognize the importance of trusted cross-border data flows and harmonized global data governance. Aligning South-South cooperation efforts with these global commitments requires a stronger focus on three critical areas.
1. Strengthening Global and Regional Data Governance
For developing countries, leveraging South-South cooperation to harmonize data governance policies is key to ensuring data interoperability, security, and accessibility. This can be done through leveraging regional mechanisms or UN system regional commissions’ support. For example, the AU Data Policy Framework helps African nations align regulations to foster a unified digital market and boost regional digital trade. Meanwhile, in Latin America, ECLAC’s inter-agency collaboration on migration statistics is strengthening governance on migration and displacement data, improving policy coherence across borders.
2. Expanding South-South Cooperation for Economic Integration and Data Collaboration
Data plays a crucial role in regional economic integration, trade facilitation, and investment planning. The ASEAN Statistical Capacity Building (EASCAB) Programme, a triangular initiative supported by EU and GIZ, helped ASEAN countries harmonize trade and labor mobility data. The ASEAN-help-ASEAN approach is essentially South-South cooperation that ensures locally sustained capacity building efforts.
Similarly, the Digital Cooperation Organization (DCO), an alliance of mostly developing countries, is enabling trusted cross-border data flows to boost investment in digital economies. Recognizing this potential, UNOSSC and DCO have formed a joint action plan to co-design digital and data cooperation projects that combine UNOSSC’s operational framework with DCO’s technical expertise.
3. Strengthening the Institutional Capacity of National Statistical Offices to Measure South-South Cooperation and Engage in Global Cooperation
National Statistical Offices (NSOs) need enhanced capacities to measure South-South cooperation contributions and integrate them into global reporting frameworks such as the SDGs. A key step in this direction is the initial voluntary conceptual Framework to Measure South-South Cooperation and the UNCTAD’s Manual for the framework to measure South–South cooperation, which supports tracking of South-South cooperation contributions under SDG indicator 17.3.1. Over 60 developing countries have expressed demands for capacity support to test this framework. Additionally, the Handbook on Integrating South-South Cooperation into Voluntary National Reviews, developed by UNOSSC and the Group of Friends of the VNRs, provides NSOs with guidance on incorporating South-South cooperation data into SDG progress reports and inform national SDG policies.
Despite these efforts, funding mechanisms for NSOs to fully engage in South-South cooperation partnerships remain limited. UN GA resolutions on South-South cooperation have consistently called for member states and partners to contribute towards UN South-South cooperation trust funds to enable scaling-up of South-South and triangular cooperation. We hope to work with partners to provide more opportunities for NSOs in developing countries to actively engage in international cooperation.
