Let’s start with a little bit of recent history. Innovative financing for the UN goes back to the International Conference on Financing for Development in 2002. The hope was that innovative financing would help to bridge the gap between what was available and what was needed to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.
At the UN in Viet Nam, we had a hunch that sharing costs associated with IT equipment, infrastructure, and skilled staff would improve our overall efficiency and save costs. With this hypothesis in mind, we started working on an integrated One United Nations Information Communications and Technology (One UN ICT) system as part of the reforms of the Delivering as One initiative.
Eradicating poverty remains a long-standing goal of global development. It’s also a centerpiece of the 2030 Agenda. And while no one would doubt the importance of this goal, a lingering question remains: how do we measure poverty and how do we best make use of poverty data?
In the development field, donors can provide funds to the UN through pooled funds, a special type of mechanism that has made our work – reaching the right people at the right time with the right resources – much easier. Thanks to pooled funds, we can support humanitarian interventions, peacebuilding, development and climate change efforts in an accountable and a flexible way.
It is now more and more accepted that big data (distinguished by higher volume, variety and velocity, and often collected/created in real time by private sector entities) has an important role to play to support the achievement of the SDGs. Many examples exist demonstrating the value of big data to target interventions based on real time information and as a source for new insights into human behaviour.
