Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what baseline data collection her Department plans to undertake in Somalia and Zimbabwe to measure progress against the Sustainable Development Goals in those countries.

In Somalia, one of the costs of protracted conflict has been the loss of national capacity to produce credible statistics. We are working with the UN and others to help rectify this, but it will be some time before proper baselines can be set across all of the SDGs. For now, we expect some progress to be made soon on the first five (covering poverty, hunger, health, education, and gender equality).

In Zimbabwe, DFID has supported a number of data collections which will be used to help measure a baseline for SDG delivery. These include the 2014 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), the 2016 Demographic Health Survey (DHS), and other data collections on Agriculture (including the Agriculture and Livestock Survey). DFID will also support a 2016 survey on Poverty, Income, Consumption and Expenditure (PICES).