Egypt was ranked the top among the Arab countries in an assessment of Arab national reporting platforms (NRPs) for sustainable development goals (SDGs), according to a report released on Tuesday by the United Nations’ ESCWA.

The ESCWA statistics and information technology cluster has implemented an analysis of available NRPs in the region, which found nine countries with publicly available NRPs for SDGs, representing 41 per cent of NRPs in the Arab region as of January 2020. 

The nine countries included Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, the State of Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

According to the assessment, the highest implementation of NRP criteria was scored by Egypt (50 per cent) followed by both Oman and Qatar (45 per cent), Jordan (35 per cent) and the State of Palestine (30 per cent).

According to the assessment, the rest of the countries are in the initial stages of NRP development with a 15 per cent implementation score, gained from complying to the multilingual accessibility criteria.

The assessment showed that the SDG platforms of Egypt and Jordan were the only two that had five options to download data, followed by Oman that had four options and the United Arab Emirates that had two options.

It also showed that the State of Palestine and Qatar had only one option, while Bahrain, Morocco and Saudi Arabia did not have any options to download data.

Nevertheless, most countries’ platforms had a machine-readable format option, which allowed users to easily process data using a computer.

“We continue our efforts to progress towards the SDGs and telling our story through People&Projects&Purpose," said Egypt’s Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat. "Egypt’s commitment to drive meaningful progress continues in this decade of action to achieve the SDGs,” she added.

This makes Egypt one of the few countries to conduct the mapping exercise with a cooperation portfolio that amounts to $25 billion, according to Al-Mashat.

The assessment was developed by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics in collaboration with UNICEF and the UN resident coordinator, which uses visualizations for a quicker grasp of data as well as proxy local indicators to identify data gaps and reflect the national development priorities.

Through the ministry of international cooperation, there are currently over 300 projects with various development partners across multiple sectors including in education, transportation, water desalination, renewable energy, entrepreneurship, women empowerment, among others that are in line with the United Nations' 17 SDGs, as according to the ministry data.