The National Human Development Report Catalog

CIESIN's National Human Development Report Data Catalog was developed to facilitate searches for disaggregated data relating to the Millennium Development Goals. The catalog summarizes data available in 52 countries' National Human Development Reports (NHDRs), which are produced in association with the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Report Office. It identifies data that are relevant to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and indicates whether they are available at a sub-national level or other breakdown (e.g. gender or age). There are 4,881 entries in this catalog, with each entry representing a distinct variable in a national HDR table.

The 52 NHDRs that were cataloged represent a subset of the 136 NHDRs that have been completed to date. Additional information about the NHDRs, including access to some online versions, is available at the NHDR Web page. The cataloged countries span all major world regions and multiple levels of development.

The catalog is in Excel format and the documentation is in Portable Document Format (PDF). To increase functionality of the catalog the columns of the spreadsheet have filters built in that permit you to reduce the visible entries based on country; year of report; geographic level; millennium goals, targets and indicators; primary data source; and/or other similar headings.

Map of Cataloged NHDRs
(*green signifies cataloged reports)

One of the major purposes of the catalog was to support mapping of data relevant to the MDGs. A selection of these maps appear in the 2003 Human Development Report, Millennium Development Goals: A Compact Among Nations to End Human Poverty. The maps and associated data are also being used to support analysis by the United Nations Millennium Project.

The creation of these maps involved a multi-step process. First, we identified the variables of interest via the NHDR Data Catalog. Next, we obtained the reports either as PDFs online or via paper copies from the HDR office. This was necessary in order to scan the data tables electronically and then to create spreadsheets using optical character recognition software. Finally, the data were spatially matched to geographic boundaries and mapped using ArcGIS software. The following maps illustrate how spatial analysis of development patterns can be enhanced through use of NHDR data.

	Human Poverty Index, Uganda (by district, 1998) click image to enlarge
	% Population with Access to Safe Water, Nigeria (by state 1993/94) click image to enlarge

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