For civil society to be able to engage in a meaningful way in contributing to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), then it must have equal and timely access to relevant data as well as decision-making documents.

An example of this is data on Gender Equality: under SDG 5, every country in the world, including all European countries, should make public a series of datasets relating to gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

Access Info’s research in 2020 found that this data was not yet available (43% of researched data was missing), and across Europe missing datasets included numbers of female legislators in local government, or detailed gender violence crime data.

The absence of SDG datasets stymies the work of civil society country-by-country and makes regional or international comparisons hard.

Access Info campaigns for better, more accessible publication of reusable data, and engages with national governments and open data groups to promote the best practices on SDG data collection and publication.