The overall objective of the “Supporting informed decision making through the DATA for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) initiative (or DATAS)” is to strengthen the capacities of national statistical offices (NSOs) and national partners to produce and disseminate better and more timely data and statistics to inform decision making through support for data governance, production, dissemination, innovation and SIDS to SIDS collaboration. This will accelerate the country’s progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while pursuing national development objectives. 

DATAS will bridge data and information gaps in priority areas identified by the country by improving human and institutional capabilities for collecting, producing and integrating data from across the data ecosystem to publish more timely and granular indicators and statistics. It will also support NSOs in their efforts to collaborate with other government and private sector entities to obtain and maintain access to non-traditional data sources to increase timeliness and granularity of statistical information. As part of this, it will work on data process flows and on formalizing data sharing among others.

The work will, overall, take the same approach as the Data for Now initiative, currently implemented by DESA’s Statistics Division, where countries, that is NSOs jointly with key users and producers, set priorities on which data and information gaps they want to prioritize for the work. Once these priorities are identified, work will commence to explore availability of non-traditional data sources, methods and tools can be used and which partners it will be most relevant to involve.