Awareness Raising/Inception Workshop on SDG Indicators under FAO Custodianship (Turkmenistan)

On 25 September 2015, the 193 Member States of the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 aspirational objectives to guide actions of governments, international agencies, civil society and other institutions over the next 15 years (2016-2030). The SDGs aim at ending poverty and hunger while restoring and sustainably managing natural resources, integrating the three dimensions of sustainable development – economic, social and environmental.

In parallel to the work on Sustainable Development Goals and targets, as early as in March 2015, UN Statistical Commission (UNSC) established the Interagency and Expert Group on SDG indicators (IAEG-SDG) with the responsibility to lead the process of development of the indicators for monitoring SDGs. The last, 7th meeting of the Group took place in April 2020. At present there are 232 unique global indicators to monitor 169 targets of SDGs.

SDG indicators have been classified into three tiers based on their level of methodological development and data availability at global level:

• Tier I – Indicator is conceptually clear, has an internationally established methodology and data regularly produced by countries for at least 50 per cent of countries and of the population in every region where the indicator is relevant.
• Tier II - Indicator is conceptually clear, has an internationally established methodology and standards are available, but data are not regularly produced by countries.
• Tier III – No internationally established methodology or standards are yet available for the indicator but methodology/standards are being (or will be) developed or tested.

For each indicator, IAEG-SDG has identified a custodian agency which is responsible for: methodological development of the indicator, providing and updating the indicator documentation; collecting data from national sources, ensuring their comparability and consistency, compiling regional and global aggregates, and disseminating data at global level; statistical capacity development of countries to generate and disseminate national data; contributing to monitoring progress at the global, regional and national levels.

FAO has been proposed as custodian agency for 21 SDG indicators (for targets in Goals 2, 5, 6, 12, 14 and 15) and a contributing agency for 6 more indicators (for targets in Goals 1, 14 and 15).

Turkmenistan, as many other countries of the region, has started nationalization process of SDG indicators. There are several challenges, particularly the fact that many of the indicators are Tier II, so their methodology was developed relatively recently. This leads to not clear understanding of importance and role of the indicators and the ways of their producing. The webinars are aimed to deal with this challenge, in particular to increase awareness of the stakeholders about the methodology of the indicators under FAO custodianship and the ways of their compilation and reporting.

Format

The proposed format of a series of online webinars is chosen because of travel restrictions due to the current COVID-19 crisis. 10 webinars will be conducted during 12-16 October, with 2 webinars per day. Each webinar, with duration of about 2 hours, will have its own target audience.

Target audience

The target audience of the webinars will be the stakeholders involved in the nationalization process of SDG indictors and the future production of the 21 indicators under FAO custodianship. In particular, these will include the representatives of the Mejlis (Parliament) of Turkmenistan, Ministry of Agriculture and Environment Protection of Turkmenistan, Ministry of Finance and Economy of Turkmenistan, State Committee on Statistics of Turkmenistan, State Committee for Water Resources of Turkmenistan and also professionals from other relevant state and non-state agencies. Participation by the members of the UN Country Team is also welcome.

Objective

The objective of the webinars is to assist the target audience in better understanding of SDG indicators under FAO custodianship. In particular, after the webinars the target audience is supposed to have a clear understanding of:

- FAO’s role on SDG monitoring and implementation at regional and national level.
- Methodology of the 21 indicators under FAO custodianship
- Data needs for producing the indicators and steps to be undertaken by the country to be able to satisfy these data needs
- Procedures of producing these indicators and interactions with FAO during these procedures.