Ensuring data quality to meet 2030 SDG deadline

Bangladesh is trailing behind its South Asian neighbours in achieving UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

According to the UN's Sustainable Development Report 2025, Bangladesh ranked 114th among 167 nations globally and scored 63.9 out of 100 on the score card of SDG index and positioned itself among the bottom three South Asian countries including Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to the UN Sustainable Development Network (UNSDN) that tracks performance progress of nations in meeting SDG targets, Bangladesh so far made limited progress as it could reach 44.2 per cent of the SDGs until June this year when the UNSDN report was released. But the performance was worse in the case of 35 per cent of the targets.  

In fact, due to changes in the methodologies of preparing the SDG index for 2025, Bangladesh's position has dropped compared to that of India. It is clear that the data reflecting the progress in different development sectors and how those (data) are being processed to prepare the report on growth index matter. That is why Bangladesh is now trailing behind India in UN's 2025 SDG ranking, though the picture was quite the opposite in 2024 when Bangladesh was ahead of India. There is no question that Bangladesh's failures in meeting the SDGs lie with inefficiencies and corruption at the field level of project implementation. But the data based on which the progress reports on SDGs had been prepared needed to be genuine.

Any manipulation of data due purely to unintentional misreporting or otherwise, can misguide policymakers when presenting their achievements in different sectors of development including SDGs. 

In this connection, mention may be made here of the recent observations of the economist, Dr Fahmida Khatun, who is also the executive director of the local policy think tank, CPD, at a recently held seminar on the role the rural people play in achieving sustainable development goals. The economist clearly pointed out that inaccurate data were proving to be the main barrier to Bangladesh's prospects of achieving SDG goals by 2030. 

Among the SDGs is also included the goal of making safe water accessible to all by 2030. What is Bangladesh's achievement in this respect so far? A recent report in this connection says that safe water is still beyond the reach of 40 per cent of the country. To be frank, progress in this regard is not much to write home about. In fact, progress in this case made in the last decade is only 3.0 per cent. At this rate, it will take many more years for Bangladesh to make 100 per cent progress in reaching safe water to all. Notably, such assessment is based on the 2025's report of the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) of the two UN bodies, UNICEF and WHO, released recently. The report which focuses on the UN's Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) is published biennially. According to the JMP report 99 per cent population of the country has access to drinking water, but not safe drinking water. This percentage was 97 per cent in 2015, according to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Obviously, the rate of progress is rather slow. The SDGs stress making 'safe drinking water', not just 'drinking water' accessible to all by 2030.

Experts have naturally raised question about the safety level of the water that people drink. According to their argument, just drinking water and safe drinking water are not the same thing.  Here the issue of safe water includes a number of factors. Among those are the conditions such as the water can be accessed from its source easily by people. The source of water should be within the precincts of the homesteads of the public. It must be available as and when necessary. Last but not least, the water should be free from any pathogens, especially originating from faecal matter such as E. coli, which can cause diarrhoea and other complications. Safe water must also be free from chemicals harmful for human health. So, taking all these factors into consideration, at present only 59 per cent of the population has access to safe drinking water. This is far from the SDGs target of reaching safe water to all by 2030. 

In this connection, experts are yet to clarify, how far the data on the public's accessibility to 'safe drinking water' have been collected, their quality ensured and then compiled and analysed by those concerned before their dissemination. Apart from the data-related issues, other hurdles  coming in the way of fulfilling SDGs include implementation of development projects in  an isolated manner and resource constraints of  the local government bodies arising from their lack of capacity to collect adequate revenue to finance development activities. Also, political polarisation can be a barrier to success in various development efforts including reducing gender gap in the area of human development. But these factors are social in nature and progress in that respect will come by way of changes in general public's perceptions and outlook about social issues such as gender parity and women's rights through their increased exposure to scientific information and other developments across the globe.       But for the common people to have easy access to quality and scientific information, affordability of digital devises like smartphones is an important consideration. The government will have to play its part in reducing prices of these digital devices so they remain within common people's purchasing capacity.  That will definitely increase the public's ability to access quality information easily. 

But before such progress is achieved, it is vital that the raw material called data that would go to produce various indicators of growth in the economy are accurate. To this end, the capacity to collect, compile, analyse and publish data by the national statistical organisation, the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), needs to be improved. 

Also, for reliable data, the government needs to strengthen the capacity of Data Center (NDC) for the government's cloud services and infrastructure. Reportedly, there is no centralised data system in Bangladesh. Which is why we have so many data collection organs including the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) for national statistics under the National Statistical Development Strategy (NSDS), a developing Open Government Data (OGD) Portal for public data access and reuse and so on. The question is of ensuring proper management, integration and interoperability of the data from different platforms. Moreover, there is the question of ensuring quality of the data so gathered from across different platforms. This is important because economists and development experts are raising serious questions about the accuracy of the government data and blaming those for its failure to achieve SDGs.