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The global SDG indicator framework establishes a set of measurement tools to assess country performances in a comparable way, and helps governments to identify appropriate policy interventions to achieve the SDG targets. Five years into the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, however, still different methods are being used by leading international organizations for assessing whether the SDG targets will be achieved or not. This may lead to different results, sometimes contradictory, generating confusion among users and policy-makers, who therefore cannot base their policy decisions on solid and coherent assessments. This article describes some of the solutions proposed by leading international organizations to address two distinct measurement objectives: (i) monitor the “current” status of achievement of a SDG target, i.e. the situation as pictured by the latest available data, and (ii) assess whether the SDG targets can be achieved by 2030. These distinct objectives are then translated in various methodological approaches, that often include also a way for identifying the targets when not explicitly set, and the procedure to obtain regional and global aggregates (as well as, aggregates by target and goal). This article provides a critical overview of the different approaches and proposes a unified coherent statistical approach for progress and status assessments, highlighting its advantages over the alternative approaches, and demonstrate its application to a specific FAO indicator. The article focuses mainly on the assessment of (i) and (ii), while is not intended to investigate the issues related the aggregation of results at target/goal level, a topic that is beyond the scope of this work.

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The adoption of international standards is essential to producing internationally comparable official statistics. However, as the particular case of the adoption of SDG indicators demonstrates, this is by no means a linear process. According to FAO’s SDG data gap assessment conducted in 2019 and other statistical capacity assessment reports (e.g. World Bank, AfDB…), financial, professional and technological capacities of national statistical agencies vary greatly between countries and regions, as does the level of political support and commitment to statistics. These differences call for more targeted interventions by international institutions to support the uptake of statistical standards. To face this challenge, FAO is increasingly building the capacity of its regional and country offices to better mainstream food and agricultural statistics in regional and national cooperation strategies and activities, while also stepping up its resource mobilization efforts. Regional roadmaps are currently being rolled out to support countries in adopting food- and agriculture-related SDG indicators and other statistical standards, taking into consideration regional particularities, the impact of UN reform, action plans developed by UN Regional Commissions and other relevant regional partnership opportunities. This paper will highlight some of the key regional differences in countries’ capacity to adapt to statistical standards, describe FAO’s regional targeted interventions in the context of food and agricultural statistics, and discuss the remaining main challenges.