Page 434 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS175 Pietro Gennari et al.
and validation mechanisms at national level and to build the capacity of NSOs
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to fulfil their role as coordinators of national monitoring in practice .
b. Specific provisions of the Guidelines that are not often followed in practice.
The Guidelines contain other provisions that are not overtly controversial,
but may become challenging when countries and/or custodian agencies
attempt to implement them. One such provision is 22.k), which describes the
situation where a custodian agency has contacted the designated national
focal point but no response has been provided within a reasonable timeframe.
In such a case, a non-response “will be taken as agreement with the statistics
shared by the custodian agency”. Many countries, however, take issue with this
provision, which is perceived by them as a way for a custodian agency to
bypass the authority of the NSO. Despite the explicit provision therefore, a
number of countries have transmitted formal complaints to custodian
agencies about this practice, which has led many organizations to self-censor
themselves publishing only the estimates of those countries that have
explicitly validated them. The consequence is a significant drop in the country
coverage for the indicator.
c. The absence of a specific mechanism for data validation
The Guidelines may have several inherent shortcomings in their various
provisions, but one of the key challenges that countries and custodian
agencies have faced in recent years is the absence of a specific mechanism for
data validation. This was, and still is, a major constraint, despite the fact that
two additional supporting documents on “criteria for implementation” as well
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as “best practices” were subsequently produced to facilitate implementation.
Neither the Guidelines nor any of these supporting documents attempt in any
way to suggest particular modalities for how parties should go about the
procedure. As a result, different custodian agencies have hitherto had to “go
it alone”, effectively improvising new procedures and tools. This creates two
types of inefficiencies: unnecessary multiplication of work as different
custodian agencies try to resolve the same problem; and increased
bewilderment and confusion among recipient countries, who are confronted
with varying approaches depending on the custodian agency. There is clearly
a need to find pragmatic solutions, as data validation is a resource-demanding
exercise for both countries and custodian agencies. At the same time, finding
a more efficient mechanism for data validation could improve data quality as
well as provide an opportunity to find solutions to the decades’ old problem

Another symptom of NSOs’ struggle with assuming a coordinating role is that less than 60
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percent have identified an SDG focal point, “expected to respond to requests from custodian
agencies in a timely manner and facilitate the coordination of data transmission within the NSSs
for global reporting on the SDGs”.
12 Op. cit., 4
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