Municipal Atlas of the SDGs in Bolivia 2020

Executive Summary

The Municipal Atlas of the Sustainable Development Goals in Bolivia 2020 is the first large project of SDSN Bolivia that presents aggregated data at the country, department and municipal level, with the purpose of systematizing information on the development of each municipality in various dimensions. The data collection and computation was led by SDSN Bolivia with the support and collaboration of a large number of people and institutions. The index uses the same methodology as the SDG Index and Dashboards (Lafortune et al., 2018), and is developed in collaboration with the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) team in Paris.

According to the latest Sustainable Development Report (Sachs et al., 2020), Bolivia performs slightly better than the average of the countries analyzed, ranking 79 out of 166 countries, with an index score of 69.3 out of 100. However, within each country there may be big differences. In fact, this Atlas shows that the differences between the municipalities in Bolivia are similar to the existing differences among all countries in the world.

For local stakeholders, this Atlas presents a multidimensional diagnostic sheet for each of the 339 municipalities covered. Decision makers at the local level can use this information to set priorities and build shared visions about the future of the municipality, as well as design critical pathways to move towards this vision.

An interactive website has also been developed where data can be explored and viewed from different perspectives (https://atlas.sdsnbolivia.org/). For example, for those interested in a specific topic (e.g. HIV), we can quickly see which municipalities have the highest and lowest incidence. This is useful for deciding where to promote interventions on different issues and problems. The Atlas is also accompanied by a series of Cross-Sectional Studies prepared with the specific objective of providing actionable proposals, applicable to the national context (https://www.sdsnbolivia.org/atlas/estudios/).