In June, thousands of data practitioners will gather in Nairobi. In November, the world's data and statistical leaders will meet in Riyadh. Two complementary events engaging partnerships, innovation, high-level political support, and sustainable financing to make data and statistics better.
The Global Data Festival and the United Nations World Data Forum are about bringing together an active, dynamic community that deeply understands how data and statistics can shape our world. They come with practical experience, impactful and innovative work, and follow diverse and creative approaches.
In Nairobi on June 2-5, the Global Data Festival takes place together with the Kenya Space Expo and Conference. It is organized by the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, the Kenya Space Agency, and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, and hosted with the Government of Kenya, the event will gather more than 1,000 people from around the world, bringing the data and space communities together to co-create a bold agenda. The programme covers artificial intelligence, space technology, climate data, health, and food security. It is deliberately open, collaborative, and led by the priorities of the data community.
The sixth United Nations World Data Forum follows in Riyadh from 9 to 12 November 2026, organised by the United Nations and hosted by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, represented by the Kingdom’s General Authority for Statistics. It is the largest gathering of the data and statistical community with participation from governments, international agencies, academia, civil society, and the private sector. It has grown from 2,000 attendees at the first Forum in 2017 to a global online network of more than 24,000 people. Its mandate is to spur data innovation, build partnerships, and mobilise political and financial support that national data systems so urgently need to serve society with high-quality, timely, open and inclusive data and statistics.
Taken together, these two events offer a rare thing: a year in which the global conversation about data for development has both a practitioner voice and an institutional one, in close enough succession that each can shape the other.
Building momentum
These events represent two milestones on a shared journey, but they are each distinct and intentionally designed to complement the other, building momentum, driving commitments, and advancing critical conversations towards better data for sustainable development.
The Global Data Festival has, across its previous editions in Bristol in 2018 and Punta del Este in 2023, built a reputation as the event where the data community takes stock of itself honestly and situates its work in the broader digital transformation agenda. The statisticians who are harnessing new data sources and emerging technologies to strengthen official statistics and contribute to a live conversation about the role of foundational data systems in an era of rapid technological change, the technologists who are building digital tools to deliver services and grow economies,, the civil society organisations trying to exert their agency over how they are represented in digital systems and hold governments accountable for how their data is used; these are its people. It is a space for candid exchange between practitioners who share problems even when they come from very different institutional contexts.
The UN World Data Forum is guided by a global inter-governmental body of national chief statisticians who place a high importance on a host country represented by the national statistical office as the focal point of the national data and statistical system. By doing so, it connects directly to the UN Statistical Commission, which sets the international standards that national statistical systems are built around. When agreements are reached and commitments are made in Riyadh, they carry institutional weight that shapes what countries do — and what they are expected to do — for years afterwards.
The distinction matters because the data ecosystem needs both functions. Practitioner energy without institutional backing tends to stall at the pilot stage. Institutional commitment without practitioner input tends to fund the wrong things. It also needs both forums for discussion, one focused on the role of foundational data systems within a broader digital agenda, and the other focusing on strengthening official statistics and national statistical systems.
Three problems neither event can solve alone
At the heart of both events is a problem that the global data community has been circling for years without fully solving: the world asks a great deal of national data systems while investing relatively little in them. Both the Global Data Festival and the UN World Data Forum are, among other things, attempts to change that, by putting the people who need the investment in the same room as the people who can provide it. That financial argument is inseparable from two others. One is about AI: whether the data infrastructure most countries have is strong enough and well-governed enough to make AI work reliably and responsibly, rather than something that is flashy and does not match up to its potential. The other is about trust: who gets to decide how data about communities is collected, used, and held to account. These are not separate debates. They are three ways of describing the same underlying question, what does it take to build data systems that serve people rather than just measure them? 2026 is a year in which that question will be put to two equally important audiences.
The Global Data Festival will gather the data community to explore these questions and imagine the way forward, with a focus on catalyzing innovative partnerships and solutions.
The UN World Data Forum provides a platform for commitments and actions started in Nairobi to be announced and advanced in Riyadh.
Why 2026 is worth paying attention to
The countries that have invested steadily in well-governed, integrated data systems are now in a measurably different position from those that have not, not just for SDG reporting, but for everything that data infrastructure makes possible: faster crisis response, more reliable economic indicators, AI applications that work because the underlying data was built to last. That gap has been growing for years, and both events are, in their different ways, organized around the urgency of closing it.
The global data community has in 2026 something it does not always have: two high-profile moments, timed well enough apart to build on each other, covering the full spectrum from practitioner to policymaker. What it does with that opportunity: whether Nairobi's energy finds its way into Riyadh's commitments, and whether Riyadh's commitments translate into the kind of sustained investment that changes what practitioners can do, will be worth watching closely. We invite you to join us for the journey that data and statistics take through these two events.
