For governments wanting to end poverty, steward
sustainable environments and foster healthy, thriving
populations with the opportunity to earn a decent living,
many of the necessary pieces are now in place. They start
from a good base. Millions of families have escaped poverty
and many million more children are in schools than was the
case 15 years ago.1
Much more is known about successful
developmental pathways.2
And many of the world’s poorest
countries are experiencing strong economic growth.
But, finance aside, there is still one key element the
absence of which is impeding progress: data. Governments
do not adequately know their own people. This is
particularly true for the poorest and most marginalised,
the very people that leaders will need to focus on if they
are to achieve zero extreme poverty and zero emissions
in the next 15 years (Granoff et al., 2014). Nor will the
international community be able to support the most
vulnerable and marginalised people without an overhaul
of the current ways of gathering statistics. As many as 350
million people worldwide are not covered by household
surveys. There could be as many as a quarter more people
living on less than $1.25 a day than current estimates
suggest, because they have been missed out of surveys
(Carr-Hill, 2013).