Tool 3: Questionnaire

The Questionnaire is a tool intended to help national data teams to evaluate their preparedness for SDG monitoring, and to subsequently draft a Data Roadmap for Sustainable Development. It was created as a step-wise exercise that either countries themselves could conduct (self­evaluation) or consultants could use (external evaluation) to review data availability for each source in the Essential Minimum Data Package.

Questions are deliberately simple. They are meant to guide respondents through important criteria for robust datasets needed for monitoring the SDGs. Particular emphasis was placed on the frequency of data collection, alignment with international standard, sample representativeness, level of disaggregation and geo­spatial attribution of data.

Once all questions are answered, countries should be able to identify gaps that need to be filled to conform to global best practices, thus enabling them to best determine where to invest to build capacity for better SDG monitoring. For example, if the question “Did your country conduct a population and housing census in the past 20 years?” prompts an affirmative answer but the following question, “How many censuses were conducted in the past 20 years?” receives the answer "ONE," then a country is able to identify that more capacity needs to be built nationally to conduct a population and housing census every 10 years (as per the guidelines in the data matrix).

The Questionnaire is meant to be further refined in partnership with national statistical offices and other data stakeholders.