LocationsDevelopment Data Partnership:
Smart Access to Private
Data for the Public Good
PROJECT OWNER: UNDP NY, United States
The UNDP’s Development Data Partnership is a strategic alliance that promotes the responsible use of private data in solutions aimed at sustainable development. This initiative brings together multilateral organizations, governments, and tech companies to facilitate secure, ethical, and efficient access to proprietary data, maximizing its value as an input for public policy formulation, predictive analytics, and social innovation.
The logic behind the Partnership is based on five key functions that address structural challenges in the development data ecosystem:
Coordination and aggregation of demand: It acts as a platform that channels data needs from public actors, enabling more effective negotiation with private providers and ensuring alignment with development objectives.
Linking public challenges with relevant data: It connects concrete public policy problems with specialized databases, facilitating the design of evidence-based solutions, especially in contexts where official data is insufficient or outdated.
Reducing transaction costs: Through standardized legal frameworks and technical intermediation processes, the partnership simplifies data use agreements, lowering the logistical, legal, and trust barriers that have historically limited public-private collaboration.
Avoiding duplication and promoting shared solutions: It allows multiple offices and agencies to avoid fragmented efforts by reusing models, analyses, and lessons learned, thus optimizing available resources and accelerating the scaling of good practices.
Fostering transparency and accountability: It establishes principles of traceability, documentation, and governance to ensure that the use of proprietary data in public processes is ethical, secure, and verifiable, building trust among all stakeholders.
Beyond data access, the Development Data Partnership strengthens institutional capacities for effective data use through technical training, governance frameworks, ethical guidelines, and open collaboration spaces. In a world where valuable information increasingly resides in the private sector, this initiative offers a viable model for transforming closed data into tools that serve the public good, helping to improve diagnostics, anticipate crises, and monitor progress toward the SDGs.
This approach reaffirms UNDP’s commitment to an inclusive digital transformation, where cross-sector cooperation enhances the strategic use of data as a driver for sustainable development, public innovation, and social justice.
This article was originally published in: https://ddp-access.undp.org/
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