“The UN-​system has accu­mu­lated over the past 60 years an impres­sive amount of infor­ma­tion. UNdata, devel­oped by the Sta­tis­tics Divi­sion of DESA, is a new pow­er­ful tool, which will bring this unique and author­i­ta­tive set of data not only to the desks of deci­sion makers and ana­lysts, but also to jour­nal­ists, to stu­dents and to all cit­i­zens of the world, ” says Sha Zukang, Under-Secretary-General for Eco­nomic and Social Affairs.

Since its foun­da­tion, the United Nations system has been col­lect­ing sta­tis­ti­cal infor­ma­tion from member states on a vari­ety of topics. The infor­ma­tion thus col­lected con­sti­tutes a con­sid­er­able infor­ma­tion asset of the orga­ni­za­tion. How­ever, these sta­tis­ti­cal data are often stored in pro­pri­etary data­bases, each with unique dis­sem­i­na­tion and access poli­cies. As a result, users are often unaware of the full array of sta­tis­ti­cal infor­ma­tion that the UN system has in its data libraries. The cur­rent arrange­ment also means that users are required to move from one data­base to another to access dif­fer­ent types of information.

UNdata addresses this prob­lem by pool­ing major UN data­bases and those of sev­eral inter­na­tional into one single inter­net envi­ron­ment. The inno­v­a­tive design allows a user to access a large number of UN data­bases either by brows­ing the data series or through a key­word search.

I love when major organ­i­sa­tions under­stand that open­ing up their knowl­edge to the public is the way to the future. We’ve added the UN data­base to our our list of resources – scroll down to ‘data’.