SDG dashboards that bureaucrats actually use

Every state has an SDG dashboard. Most of them are opened twice — once at launch, once when the donor asks for a screenshot. The dashboards that get used every week look meaningfully different from the dashboards that don't, and the difference is not visual polish. It is who the dashboard was actually designed for.

The default failure mode Most SDG dashboards are designed for the donor visit. They lead with a hero "17 SDG goals" landing page that looks great in a screenshot and is useless for a department secretary who actually has to act on it. The secretary needs to know which district is lagging on which indicator and what the trend looks like. Not the global score.

What a usable dashboard does differently - Lands a department user on **their** indicators, not on the 17-goal hero - Shows the indicator at the smallest unit of meaningful action (usually district) - Shows a trend, not just a current value — direction matters more than level - Exports cleanly to whatever format the user actually reports in (PDF, Excel) - Has a defined ingestion cadence per department, with a freshness indicator on every chart

The political economy point The reason dashboards fail is rarely technical. It is that the dashboard asks line departments to surrender their data without giving them anything back. A dashboard that helps a department secretary brief their minister well next Monday is a dashboard that gets data on time. A dashboard that only serves the State Planning Department's reporting needs gets a slow trickle.

The state-capacity argument Done well, an SDG dashboard is not a donor artifact. It is a piece of state capacity — a shared evidence base across departments that previously talked past each other. That requires designing it as state infrastructure, not as a deliverable.