Why this session matters to us
Five days earlier, the Forum’s formal review of small island developing states delivered a blunt baseline: the first monitoring framework for the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS (ABAS) cannot see most of the islands it was built for, because the national statistical systems behind it were never resourced to produce the data. This side event was the sequel, and a more practical one. It asked what a country is supposed to do with a Voluntary National Review once the reporting is done, and whether the partnership machinery the UN has built around SIDS can turn a finding into finance.
That is close to the reason SDGCounting exists. The VNR is the single largest body of country-reported SDG data the system has, and this hour was a rare, candid look at what it is actually worth. The honest answer from the islands themselves: the review has matured into a genuine planning and data instrument, but its value is capped by two things it cannot supply on its own, statistical capacity and money, and the partnership process meant to supply them still counts offers rather than delivery.
The bottleneck every island named
Four island states presented, and each was asked for the lesson that mattered most. They converged on the same one. Not climate, not finance in the abstract, but data, the ability to measure their own progress at all.
He added the point most scorecards miss: for a country of a few tens of thousands of people, the sheer volume of SDG indicators is itself the problem. “Our small system can struggle to keep pace and identify priorities or gaps, given the large amount of data.” Saint Kitts and Nevis put the same diagnosis in institutional terms, and it was the most useful sentence of the morning for anyone who builds these systems.
The scale of the archive is not the problem. UN DESA told the room that by the close of this Forum its database will hold 437 VNR reports, 68 of them from SIDS, with the seven small island states reviewing this year all on their second or third round. The data about the data is thin precisely where the reports say the most.
One reporting spine, not two
The specific measurement anxiety in the room was double counting. SIDS now owe reports against both the SDGs and ABAS, their own ten-year agenda, and the fear is a second parallel reporting exercise on top of an already overstretched statistical office. The answer the UN agencies pushed, repeatedly, was to collapse the two into one spine rather than run them side by side.
UN DESA noted that ABAS is roughly 80% aligned with the SDGs and argued the VNR can stay the overarching vehicle for both. OHRLLS reported the same conclusion from a SIDS VNR Lab held the previous week: the ABAS monitoring and evaluation framework “should not become a parallel reporting exercise,” and alignment has to be built into national planning from the outset, not bolted on. Behind that sit the instruments meant to make it real, an ABAS indicator database under the UN Statistics Division, a SIDS Global Data Hub under the ABAS Centre of Excellence, a DESA guide for evidence-based VNRs, and a national focal points toolkit. Whether any of them closes the capacity gap the countries described is the open question; for now they are scaffolding, not yet load-bearing.
Guinea-Bissau showed what the convergence looks like when a country commits to it. Its councillor described a new national development plan running to 2035, structured around six pillars and 81 programmes and fully mapped to the SDGs, and then made the institutional move that matters for measurement.
The most valuable output was not the report
The sharpest reframing came from Saint Kitts and Nevis, which structured its whole intervention around what the VNR had surprised it into learning. The surprises were all about the process, not the document. A first local review in Nevis reshaped the national one. Public consultations turned a government exercise into a national conversation, on the condition that the government first explained what it was asking people to join.
And the review doubled as an audit of the country’s own institutions, exposing where data sat uncollected and coordination was missing. Her conclusion is the one that should travel, because it redefines what the reporting is for.
She was also the one speaker willing to name the constraint the panel otherwise talked around. Asked what partnership and financing model had supported the work, she answered plainly: “We did not have the necessary financing; it was a challenge.” The diagnosis is excellent and largely self-funded. The action on it is where the money has to come from someone else.
What the partnerships actually are
This is where the session named its own reason to exist. Portugal, presenting the co-chairs’ premise, drew the line the whole event turned on.
The Steering Committee on Partnerships for SIDS is the “what follows.” Belize, the other co-chair, described it as the mechanism that carries the requests and offers coming out of a session like this one into the SIDS partnership calendar, the partnership labs, the Global Multi-Stakeholder SIDS Partnership Dialogue, the SIDS Global Business Network Forum (in the Maldives, 23 to 25 August), and a newly launched round of SIDS partnership awards.
Two partners showed what “concrete” can look like when it is anchored to a VNR. Italy said it now treats the reviews as the reference point for where to spend, and gave two worked examples: a deforestation-free cocoa value-chain project in Belize built on that country’s 2024 review of SDG 12, and a climate-resilient community centre in Saint Lucia built on its 2025 review of SDG 13. Italy put its SIDS cooperation at more than 50 million euros across some 80 projects since 2007, figures it reported for itself.
The UN Office for South-South Cooperation described the matchmaking layer being built on top: a Global Alliance for South-South and Triangular Cooperation launching in September, and an expanded knowledge platform, South-South Galaxy Plus, whose explicit job is “matching development needs identified through processes such as the VNR with relevant solutions, technical expertise, and partnership opportunities.” Jamaica, meanwhile, offered the fullest proof that the chain can close: its reviews have seeded a systemic risk-assessment platform built with Oxford, the UK development office and the University of the West Indies, and shock-responsive social protection delivered with the World Food Programme after Hurricanes Beryl and Melissa.
Our read
The SIDS Partnership Framework has a member-states steering committee, an annual partnership dialogue, and, on paper, a standardised partnership reporting process. What this session repeatedly did was capture: capture requests, capture offers, capture ideas for follow-up. Capture is not the same as track. Nobody in the room could point to a running count of which registered partnerships had actually delivered against the needs earlier reviews identified, and the honest testimony, Saint Kitts on its missing finance, Jamaica’s successes assembled partner by partner, was that follow-through happens case by case and person by person, not through any instrument that measures it in aggregate.
That is the same gap the SIDS review exposed one week earlier, in a different currency. There, a vulnerability index existed but had no binding force on lenders. Here, a partnership registry exists but has no visible accounting of delivery. The islands have done the hard, diagnostic half of the work: they have turned the VNR into a data backbone and named their own constraints with unusual candour. The half that is still on trust is whether the partnerships built to answer those constraints get counted as rigorously as the reviews that surface them. Watch the Maldives forum in August, and watch whether the next partnership dialogue reports delivery, not just intake.
Why it matters for the SDGs
The session sits squarely on SDG 17, which bundles the means of implementation, the global partnership, follow-up and review, and, underneath all of it, data. It also carries the weight of SDG 13 (climate) and SDG 14 (oceans), the two goals on which SIDS are most exposed and least able to self-insure. The measurement lesson generalises well beyond islands: a review is only as valuable as the follow-up it triggers, and follow-up is only credible if someone is counting it. SIDS have built the first half. The Forum still owes them a partnership process that can prove the second.
Watch & read
- The SIDS Partnership Framework (UN DESA), the steering committee, the partnership dialogue and the standardised partnership reporting process behind this event.
- The Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS (ABAS), the ten-year agenda whose monitoring framework this session tried to fold into the VNR.
- The four island reviews discussed: Marshall Islands, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Guinea-Bissau and Jamaica, gathered in our Voluntary National Reviews 2026 brief.
- The small island developing states review (5th meeting, 9 July), where the first ABAS baseline landed and the data gap was laid bare · The 8th meeting, where the Marshall Islands and Guinea-Bissau presented · The 11th meeting, where Saint Kitts and Nevis presented the same day as this event.
- UN Web TV, recording of the side event · Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Speakers are cited by role or country where a name could not be independently confirmed. Figures are as speakers and countries reported them and were not independently verified.