THE RESEARCH

Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030 - the development agenda for the global community has been agreed upon and set. Each country will choose the indicators that are best suited to track its own progress towards sustainable development.

Then there are a risks that, by focusing solely on the SDG indicators, governments may waste resources on data for data’s sake, rather than identifying local priorities. Understanding of local priorities require a simple but well-structured bottom-up approach to track the progress towards SDGs by taking into account the views of target beneficiaries and the people involved. Taking a bottom-up approach will be essential to successfully identify and deliver on priorities.

Participatory monitoring is one way of generating the data needed to close the information gaps and achieve the evidence base needed for robust implementation of the SDGs. In this sense, the data/information pouring in from the participatory monitoring will complement, and not intended to substitute, the monitoring based on the non-participatory data compiled by...