About Us

CountryData is a new web based application to enable countries to share their national development indicators with the global user community. CountryData improves the availability and visibility of these priority indicators and facilitates their reconciliation with international datasets used to measure the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This reconciliation addresses data discrepancies between national and international data that often leads to confusion among users, undermines the credibility of statistical systems and can have serious policy implications.

CountryData achieves the greater availability, visibility and reconciliation of these important indicators by:

• Displaying national development indicators and related information each country would particularly like to draw the global user community's attention to;
• Making use of innovative Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX) tools to ensure standardized, efficient and more complete data and metadata exchange between the national and international level;
• Comparing national and international estimates of MDGs and highlighting reasons for their differences when they exist;
• Providing detailed reference metadata for both national and international data to enable users to make more informed decisions on which dataset are fit for the purpose required.

CountryData has been developed by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) thanks to a project funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). CountryData will initially disseminate data and metadata for the following 11 project participants in Asia and Africa: Burundi, Cambodia, Ghana, Laos, Liberia, Morocco, Rwanda, State of Palestine, Thailand, Uganda and Vietnam