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Administration, planning, and foresight are three siblings of varying age with different familial responsibilities.

Organizing information, understanding trends and making strategic decisions based on data is becoming an inexorable necessity. Many initiatives have highlighted the importance of using data to conceptualize and implement more effective development strategies: the Independent Expert Advisory Group’s report A World that Counts: Mobilizing the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solution Network’s report Data for Development are just two examples showing that there is no way back from data in our field of work.

During my internship with the United Nations Development Operations Coordination Office (UNDOCO), we organized a virtual innovation fair devoted to Real Time or Frequent Monitoring.  With only coffee as an incentive, Rose Sherman and Mita Paramita from Brightfront Group did all the leg work.

The UN was established on the principles of human rights and respect for the environment, these principles still govern our work. Aren’t we are supposed to be those who don’t forget?

The UN has been in Haiti a long time. The most recent iteration of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) arrived 11 years ago. And it has been ‘shall we stay or shall we go’, for some years now. Maybe 2016 is the year where, finally, the decision to wrap up a full peace keeping mission does happen. For real. And for many, Haitians and UN colleagues alike, it is about time.

The bottom-up approach taken worldwide to formulating the SDGs has indeed been unprecedented. In order to maintain this approach in monitoring and implementing the agenda, we need to ensure the population comprehends it. People need to understand the commitment and role of national and local government, how they can hold duty-bearers to account, and their own role and responsibility for the sustainable development of their communities.

Buckminster Fuller was a polymath and one of the most well regarded futurists of the 20th century. Bucky, as he liked to be called, astutely encapsulated the aim of foresight in a single phrase: “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.”

The recent surge of hundreds of thousands of refugees travelling from Syria and elsewhere into Europe has prompted new debate about the international aid response to the crisis caused by the Syrian conflict. Should European and other countries do more to help refugees leaving Syria and its neighbours? Should they do more to help in Syria and its neighbours? Can more be done to bring about an end to the war?

Having survived the UNDAF process, I provide these reflections in hope that my personal experience and personal convictions will help you and your United Nations Country Team (UNCT). These comments reflect personal experience – and where experience failed to meet expectations, personal convictions. Most will be self-evident, yet not applicable everywhere; and all may be totally misconceived.