International Geneva urged to become global data hub
International organisations in Geneva have been set the challenge of harnessing the vast amounts of data they produce for the betterment of democracy.
Swiss President Alain Berset set down the challenge as he opened the first ‘Project Rosling’ event in the Swiss City.
Project Rosling has set itself the task of strengthening the role of statistics and data in policy discussions and decision-making.
Achieving this objective entails making more data publicly accessible in a timely and reliable manner.
Project Rosling, named after Swedish statistician Hans Rosling, was conceived from the 2021 United Nations World Data Forum that was hosted in the Swiss capital of Bern.
It has set itself goals in several areas: data literacy (the ability to identify, collect, process, analyse and interpret data); financing data; data stewardship; data science; population projections and climate change and health data.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has set a target for making data more freely accessible to the public.
As the host city to many UN offices and some 750 NGOs, ‘International Geneva’ was seen as the idea place to kick-start Project Rosling.
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