Article by Barbara Thomas, Los Angeles-based freelance writer
The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and UCLA began a very important conversation last month among a dozen or so of the world’s most esteemed strategists, statisticians and social scientists. The Global Indicators Conference, a daylong convening, invited some of the world’s “best counters” to shares their work measuring poverty and social progress.
In the fall of 2015, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously approved the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) a holistic blueprint for action aimed at putting the planet and its inhabitants on a sustainable course by 2030 The 17 SDGs are the next generation of the U.N.’s previous metric—the Millennium Development Goals.
The invitees to the convening have or are devising separate metrics, to measure SDG progress. . The Hilton Foundation thought it important that these organizations begin to share their respective efforts and determine whether there might be ways to work in alignment.
“As a strategic grantmaker, the Hilton Foundation recognizes the importance of metrics, in advancing the SDGs’’ said Edmund J. Cain, vice president of grants programs for the Hilton Foundation. Along with the Ford Foundation and MasterCard Foundation, Hilton is a founding funder of the SDG Philanthropy Platform. The Hilton Foundation also awarded the UCLA WORLD Policy Analysis Center $5.44 million to train future world leaders who have a chance at implementing the SDGs.
The urgency in the room was palpable. The goals, it was felt, need to be achieved by 2030 if we hope to put our planet on a sustainable, secure and equitable course. It was noted for example that as many as 32 percent of the world’s children are undersized and undernourished. Another generation will be lost if we do not address this problem in the next 15 years. Another example mentioned was that almost a billion people do not have potable water. And it was recognized that the climate change clock tells us we can no longer delay action on global warming. Philanthropic organizations, it was agreed should be guided by human development indicators as they relate to the SDGs to target their limited resources for maximum impact.
Among the meeting participants were:
Petra Krylova of the Center for Global Development was adamant that measuring is meant to inform, “They are meant to inspire, and not to blame-and-shame. Most of these policies are actually win-win solutions for the world.”
In another memorable moment, Social Progress Imperative CEO Michael Green said, “You can tell me that Denmark is the happiest country in the world, but that doesn’t tell me how to become a happier country.’’ This idea is so popular that Green’s Ted Talk has more than 1 million views.
The group was eager to share information and help each other paint an accurate and thoughtful portrait of the world. Was it possible to build, as one asked, “The Mother of All Databases?”
It’s hard to imagine the world before the information explosion of the past 25 years. In 1990, the United Nations Development Programme developed the Human Development Index, designed to measure quality of life and a nation’s success through life expectancy, the length of education, and per capita income years. With this information, countries were prodded to change policies, philanthropic organizations could more efficiently target programs and social progress was more easily measured. The past couple of decades have shown that indices can change discourse and challenge national governments to act in their people’s interests by providing useful links between data and policy.
“In 2016, there’s a mania for metrics,’’ said Measure of America Co-director Kristen Lewis.
Indeed, more and more with the popularity of indices, it can be quite confusing to process what is accurate and what is an unscientific comparison. For example, cities may declare themselves “Most Livable City’’ but the measures could be limited to simple variables like weather and commute time.
The technology revolution now provides data that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Today, the use of cell phones is better at tracking human migration than the satellite images from the sky. The Centers for Disease Control studies Google searches to predict where the next flu outbreak will occur. Big data holds great promise for the indices crowd, but finding the right data is challenging.
As the one-day conference wrapped up, the group agreed to continue the conversation. In the meantime, the Hilton Foundation has published a public summary of the meeting on its website and made available photos from the event.