Vanuatu's National Sustainable Development Plan

The National Sustainable Development Plan sets 15 goals under three pillars (Society, Environment, and Economy), 98 policy objectives, 196 indicators and 205 targets. The society pillar seeks to ensure we maintain a vibrant cultural identity underpinning a peaceful, just and inclusive society that is supported by responsive and capable institutions, delivering quality services to all citizens. The environment pillar seeks to ensure a pristine natural environment on land and at sea that continues to serve our food, cultural, economic and ecological needs, and enhance resilience and adaptive capacity to climate change and natural disasters. The economy pillar seeks to ensure we have a stable economy based on equitable, sustainable growth that creates jobs and income earning opportunities accessible to all people in rural and urban areas.

Via the Online Platform

The NSDP Platform is an adaptation of the Open SDG Platform, with Vanuatu being the first country globally to localise it to its national development needs. The Platform was built exclusively with open-source libraries and tools and can be hosted and maintained using free services. The key features of this platform are its ability to read data and visualise the information through graphs, tables and maps. The Platform facilitates Vanuatu to gather, disseminate, and track national or local data on the NSDP indicators, including identification of data gaps. Additionally, it improves access to official statistics and metadata; enabling Vanuatu to report national data in a harmonised format; and improving communication between data producers and users, custodian agencies, and other stakeholders.

Structure of the NSDP online platform

The NSDP online platform is structured according to pillars, goals, policy objectives and the associated indicators. The Department of Strategic Policy, Planning & Aid Coordination (DSPPAC) reviews the strategy and its indicators in partnership with all government departments and adjusts them if necessary. For example, indicators can be replaced, or new ones added. Each NSDP indicator is shown on its own page individually or together with an indicator that is closely related in terms of content. The development of the indicator and - as far as possible - the target to be achieved for Vanuatu are visualized in a graphic. The definitions and intentions as well as the development of the indicators are explained in the meta-data. For some indicators, the data can also be disaggregated. However, the indicated target to be achieved remains the nationwide target.

Evaluation of the indicators

For most indicators, a weather symbol - from sunshine to thunderstorms - shows in an easy-to-understand way how the indicator is moving on the desired path towards the target. Explanations on the definition of the symbols can be found here. Weather symbols for the last four years can be found under the “INDICATOR OVERVIEW” button on the respective indicator page. Using the weather symbols, it is possible to roughly estimate how stable the development has been recently. However, they do not replace the explanatory texts with their background information. At the top of the NSDP page, you can click on the “EVALUATION” button and select “INDICATOR OVERVIEW” to display the entire temporal development of the weather symbols for all indicators.

Technical background

In order to be able to present the data in a processed form, the open source project Open SDG on GitHub offers a standardized template for an online platform.

The NSDP online platform is a publicly accessible instrument for disseminating and presenting data on the indicators of the Vanuatu National Sustainable Development Plan.

Sources

The project code for the NSDP online platform is publicly available in the Vanuatu National Statistics GitHub Repository. GitHub is where over 65 million developers shape the future of software, together. The Vanuatu National Statistics Office is the first government instiution in the Pacific to enhance evidence based decision-making through the application of GitHub. Data scientists need to use Github for much the same reason that software engineers do — for collaboration, ‘safely’ making changes to projects and being able to track and rollback changes over time. It is, therefore, becoming more and more important that data scientists are proficient in the use of version control.

A universal version of the code developed by the US, UK and the Center for Open Data Enterprise for an online platform is available. The NSDP online platform is based on this. If you are interested, we recommend that you review the SDG online platforms in the USA and Great Britain and the corresponding Open SDG project documentation to familiarise. This contains technical instructions on how, for example, a copy of the Open SDG online platform can be created.

• SDG online platform USA
• SDG online platform Great Britain

If you have any comments or feedback on the Open SDG project, or would like to join the Open SDG community, contact the Open SDG GitHub.

Software used

Back-end IT requirements:

• GitHub: hosting the website designed for programming projects using the Git version control system.
• Jekyll: Generator for static pages written in Ruby.

Front-end IT requirements:

• XHTML, CSS, JavaScript
• Chartist: JavaScript library
• Bootstrap: framework CSS