The Asean will ask the Philippines to take the lead in crafting the region’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to the Asean Secretariat.
At the sidelines of the Asean Statistical Forum on Tuesday, Asean Secretariat (ASEANstats) Statistics Division Senior Officer Puguh B. Irawan told the BusinessMirror the Philippines is in a position to help other Asean member-nations because it already has its own set of indicators to monitor SDG performance.
The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) said the country has already identified 155 indicators to monitor the Philippines’s performance in the SDGs— the first country in the Asean to do so.
“From my communication with colleagues from the PSA, they have already come up with a concrete number of national priority SDG indicators just recently. We are not sure about the other Asean members. Maybe we will wait until the end of the year for them to come up with their indicators,” Irawan said in an interview.
Of the 155 indicators identified by the PSA, around 103 indicators came from the global SDG indicators. The remaining 52 indicators were obtained from other sources and were added to the list to meet the SDGs.
The global SDG has 232 indicators needed to meet 17 goals. However, there are global indicators that are not applicable or relevant to local settings and, as such, require countries to come up with their own indicators to achieve the goals. The Philippines was able to craft its own indicators through the PSA under the guidance of National Statistician Lisa Grace Bersales, who is also part of the global expert group on SDGs.
Irawan said this is also one of the reasons the Asean stats decided to turn to the Philippines to lead the regional effort in crafting indicators for member-states.
“I think the Philippines is more advanced than others. You came up with, I think, SDG indicators. We will request the Philippines to lead the discussion, especially next year in the technical working group,” Irawan said.
In a presentation at the forum, PSA Assistant National Statistician Candido J. Astrologo Jr. said the Philippines is one country in the Asean that has one of the highest statistical capacities. Based on data from the World Bank, the Philippines ranked third in the Asean in terms of overall statistical capacity between 2004 and 2016.
However, the country’s performance declined from its top ranking between 2008 and 2013. In 2014 the Philippines was outranked by Indonesia and Thailand and shared the same position with Vietnam in 2016.
One of the reasons cited for the decline in the country’s performance in statistical capacity was the outdated base year of the National Income Accounts (NIA).
Astrologo said, ideally, the country needs to have a base year of 10 years for the NIA. However, the country is still using a base year of 2000 instead of 2007.
He said one of the reasons this cannot be done is the lack of staff at the PSA to do the annual rebasing of the NIA.
“The next step is to continue to invest in statistics, invest in statisticians and invest in statistical offices,” Astrologo said. “We need investments in statistics to attain our vision for the statistical system for the next five years, or 2018 to 2023.”