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Ideas for driving progress at the dawn of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have emerged from Zambia’s experience in shaping the post-2015 development agenda.

When crisis strikes, data – normally provided by national counterparts – suddenly can be in short supply, or outright unavailable. Each organization scrambles to find, or produce, the basic data they need to function in the crisis, with little time to consider common data needs, common collection systems or data sharing. The result is often translated into disconnected or overlapping responses, or simply the lack of appropriate responses.

During the Syria crisis years, the context in Jordan has changed significantly. The situation has evolved from an initial focus on life-saving humanitarian assistance to a time when assistance to refugees and host communities must be equally prioritized.

What is big data and how can it benefit human development? A recent Big Data Bootcamp opened the floodgates on a deluge of data and asked the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to think about how to use it in meaningful ways.

Technology is enabling a group at risk of stigma and discrimination in Thailand to voice their concerns and make an impact.  iMonitor+ is a new

The new sustainable development agenda is transformative, rights-based and universal. Without a doubt, supporting countries to implement the new agenda requires a United Nations system that is “fit for purpose” and I see six steps we can take before 1 January 2016. We have a tremendous opportunity to re-position the UN system to maximize its unique comparative advantages in support of sustainable development.

The MDGs were brief enough to fit on the back of a business card. The 17 goals currently agreed are something different. One difference is how they tackle national obstacles (in developed and developing countries). The UN family and the Brazilian government, one of the leading champions of sustainable development in the world, have opened up a new dialogue mechanism to assess what works best in Brazil.

An ecosystem is a community of living organisms interacting as a system. The ecosystem is more than the sum of its parts: each member of the community depends on acting and working together. Becoming an ecosystem will require bringing together all the United Nations’ capacities, even the ‘soft’ ones – like our convening power . This will guarantee the system’s ability to act holistically and to link the national and global levels.

The data revolution is upon us. So they say and so it happens! Our United Nations office in Malawi has been developing a real-time programme monitoring framework. This is about monthly or quarterly data. So, it is not quite real-time but far more frequent than our traditional pace.

Montenegro sits at one far end of the vast and varied spectrum of countries in which the UN operates. It is upper-middle-income and a country on a