This piece was originally published by Devex on July 8, 2025. Read the original here.
As global development budgets shrink, we can't afford to waste a single dollar. Yet funding is often fragmented. One of the smartest investments is in the data that governments use to make decisions that shape societies, and aligning behind national systems would deliver more and better for donors, governments, and people alike.
Imagine if, every time a bilateral donor or an NGO wanted to work with a new community, they built a brand new road to get there — one that didn’t connect with any existing routes. Travelers would have to choose a road and stick to it, even if others were faster and safer, and goods could only move on that donor’s roads. Meanwhile, governments are left scrambling to stitch together a national network from a tangle of disconnected roads, each built in isolation to serve a different agenda.
This is how too much donor funding for data works in low-income countries.
Many roads, but no shared map
Go into any ministry in these countries and you’re very likely to find multiple data systems — each one a product of a different project or program. Systems are set up in good faith and for good reasons; donors need reliable data to monitor progress and evaluate outcomes, and they rightly insist on high standards of quality and security.
But ultimately, the cost of this fragmented approach is too high. Isolated decisions may serve individual projects, but they weaken entire systems and lead to an outcome that is worse for the country as a whole.
This isn’t just inconvenient. It drains government capacity, wastes money, and erodes public trust in development. It makes life harder for governments that are trying to increase data sharing across departments to strengthen domestic resource mobilization and service delivery. Many donors are supporting national efforts to strengthen data systems, but sometimes their actions in other parts of their portfolio undermine this goal. Were a fraction of what is spent on data in sector-level projects and programs redirected to strengthen national data systems, it could support the public services and policymaking that countries truly rely on.
A turning point in Sevilla?
Last week’s Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development in Sevilla is a chance for change. The newly agreed outcome document talks a lot about partnerships, coherence, national leadership, effectiveness — and data.
Encouragingly, data is one of the few topics where there’s real consensus among United Nations member states. But consensus without action isn’t enough.
The next step is clear and already written down. The Sevilla outcome document urges all governments to strengthen national data and statistics systems and calls on donors to pledge that official development assistance supports national platforms, not parallel ones. Now, with the launch of the Sevilla Platform for Action, a coalition led by Colombia, Norway, and the United Kingdom plans to take these ideas forward. The agreement is in place, and the test is what happens next.
What it takes to be smarter, together
Here are three practical ways to deliver on this vision:
- Treat data like roads and build shared systems
Data is most useful when it’s shared. This is true for data across government, and data that is collected by outside partners, including donors. To build systems that work for everyone, all groups collecting data in a country should commit to sharing the data that they collect with the national statistics office, in formats that mean it can easily be absorbed into national systems.
Governments must also commit to sharing data between institutions, enabling better decision-making through coordination. Sensitive data can be handled with care, but the default must be that data — like roads — is treated as the public good it is.
- Stop funding in isolation and start investing in national platforms
A national data system functions best when everyone collaborates. Creating a single system needs to start at the root; instead of building standalone systems, donors and implementers should allocate a small slice of project budgets to support core national data platforms. It’s better for their own data needs and for everyone else. If country ownership or sustainability are to mean anything, this is essential.
- The ROI is real — investing in data pays off
Changing how money is spent matters, but sometimes more is needed from donors and from domestic spending. And it delivers results; a study in Ghana showed that investments in some basic data collection technology led to a doubling of tax revenue. We know that investing in data works; every $1 invested in data systems yields an average return of $32. Funding national capacity, inclusive data systems, innovation, and technology is more than an act of solidarity -— it’s a sound development strategy and key to achieving all other objectives.
Align efforts and multiply the impact
Disconnected roads make for inefficient journeys, and disconnected data does the same. If we want public services that work, policies grounded in evidence, and better value for money for every development dollar, we need to all start moving in the same direction on data and fund it like the infrastructure it is.
This piece was originally published by Devex on July 8, 2025. Read the original here.
