Abstract

As governments assume the key role in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Agenda 2030), national indicators of progress towards its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) deserve a careful analysis. Based on the insight from policy actors in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda, this presentation positions the localisation of SDG indicators as an ongoing negotiation between global comparability and locally contextualised measures of progress, embedded in the unresolved question of development accountability. Agenda 2030’s gender statistics bottlenecks further interrogate the traditional priorities of scaling up disaggregated data collection. Instead of pursuing the global standard of imagined statistics, experts are advocating for the integration of official and non-official statistics and coherent links across data collection, interpretation, and mobilisation for evidence-based decision-making. Urgent efforts to reconceptualise a more integrated approach to SDG progress tracking, rooted in local articulations of global policy goals, are imperative for SDG reporting and post-2030 agenda discussions.