NUCLEAR POWER IN BELARUS AND WORLDWIDE
MINSK, 28 January (BelTA) - The national reporting platform on the Sustainable Development Goals in Belarus will be adapted to specific needs of various regions, BelTA learned from Yelena Kukharevich, the vice chairperson of the Belarusian National Statistics Committee, the head of the interdepartmental working group to monitor and assess the country's distance to achieving the SDGs.
The national platform is a single center to collect and collate relevant information about the current situation with the SDGs and to prepare national reports. It is a source of information to monitor progress in the fulfillment of international obligations (and thus determine the place of Belarus in global rankings), to involve the society in the sustainable development matters. In addition, the platform will help the government bodies to make management decisions. This resource in its current version is available on the website of the National Statistics Committee.
“We are planning to modernize the national platform to include the regional data. We have drawn up lists of regional indicators as part of the work to localize the SDGs. They reflect national priorities and also specific features of every region. Data for these indicators will also be uploaded to the platform,” Yelena Kukharevich said. Building up the statistical capacity in the field of monitoring will help address the problem of data gaps, she noted.
The platform is based on the national list of indicators for monitoring the SDGs: all in all 255. Of them, 140 fully correspond to the global indicators. Twenty are calculated by international organizations, 9 are proxy indicators (no methodological approaches have been developed across 41 indicators. The remaining indicators have been calculated by Belarus in accordance with the country's development priorities).
A total of 25 government bodies and organizations are in charge of the production of data across the indicators on the national list. The platform gives them an opportunity to choose the most convenient way to provide information. Plans are in place to integrate the platform with the existing public information resources and data systems. They will be uploaded into the platform automatically.
Some 188 indicators are available on the platform. “This is 75% of the indicators that are considered important for the country. This quite a high level of data availability,” Yelena Kukharevich noted.
“Thanks to the platform, the interaction with international organizations will be smoother. They often use information from a variety of sources, which causes discrepancies with the official statistics. The platform will eliminate the duplication of information flows. Now all information relating to the sustainable development will be provided to the international organizations by the National Statistics Committee only,” Yelena Kukharevich noted.
