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The author is the chairman of the United Nations Statistics Committee.
When the United Nations established the Statistics Committee in 1946, the world was still recovering from the devastation of World War II. There has since been a wide consensus that only reliable, internationally comparable data could prevent conflict, combat, poverty, and global cooperation. Almost 80 years later, this insight is totally relevant, but the context has changed dramatically.
The world is currently facing not only geopolitical and environmental crises, but also deep digital transformation. Data has become a strategic asset. Controlling it today means impact on the future. The rapid rise of AI with vast amounts of data presents a difficult challenge for the United Nations. People who control data today will form AI tomorrow. As the impact of commercial platforms and algorithmic systems grows, public agencies are lagging behind. The National Statistics Office, the backbone of independent data production, is under severe financial pressure.
This erosion of institutional capacity could not come at a more important moment. The United Nations is unable to respond appropriately as it faces a lack of staffing in itself. Continuing measures in austerity at the UN have left many senior positions vacant, with the director of UN Statistics resigning and no successors appointed. This happens when bold and innovative initiatives are urgently needed, such as newly envisaged, reliable data stations, to make official statistics more accessible and machine-readable.
Meanwhile, the threat of targeted disinformation is on the rise. On social media, the spread of content distorted or manipulated at unprecedented speeds. New tools like AI chatbots make the problem worse. These systems rely on web content rather than validated data and are not built to separate truth from falsehood. Worse, many governments are unable to make data available to AI now, as AI is not standardized, not machine-readable, and is not openly accessible. The space for plain, evidence-based discourse is reduced.
This trend undermines public confidence in institutions, portrays policy decisions of their legitimacy, and puts the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at risk. Without reliable data, the government is flying blindly – or even worse, they are deliberately misunderstood.
If a country loses control of its data or cannot integrate it into a global decision-making process, they will be bystanders in their development. Their economic, social and environmental decisions are then outsourced to AI systems trained with distorted, non-representative data. Global South is particularly at risk, with many countries not having access to quality data infrastructure. In countries such as Ethiopia, unverified information spreading rapidly on social media has promoted misinformation-driven violence.
The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated that strong data systems will enable better crisis response. Creating a global, reliable data station (TDO) is essential to combat these risks. This UN coordinated, democratically governed platform helps to catalogue and create accessible, reliable data around the world, while fully respecting national sovereignty.
Host a global metadata catalog, a specialized search engine that shows which data exists, where it is stored, how it is collected, and how it is collected, and reliability. Importantly, raw data is under the control of national producers, ensuring that high-quality data is transparent, interoperable and usable in the age of AI. TDO supports trust wherever you suspect today.
History shows the consequences of ignoring public interest in digital spaces. A small number of technology companies now dominate the vast scope of digital infrastructure, control the flow of data, and form public discourse on a large scale. These mistakes should not be repeated with AI and data.
Data should not be treated as a small number of exclusive property. It is in the public interest of the world, and the UN must step up as its custody. This will allow citizens, institutions and governments to make decisions based on comprehensive data that they can equally trust. To achieve this vision, it requires investment in political will, institutional and technical capabilities, and new partnerships between government, academia, civil society and the private sector.
A recent UN conference has recognized that high-quality data and statistics enable evidence-based policy decisions, increasing accountability and transparency. But the actions are: The future of democracy, development and peace depends on whether reliable data is placed at the heart of global governance.
