Data for a decade of action:

Raj Kumar is the Founding President and Editor-in-Chief at Devex, the media platform for the global development community. He is a media leader and former humanitarian council chair for the World Economic Forum and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His work has led him to more than 50 countries, where he has had the honor to meet many of the aid workers and development professionals who make up the Devex community. He is the author of the book "The Business of Changing the World," a go-to primer on the ideas, people, and technology disrupting the aid industry.

Francesca Perucci is Chief of the Development Data and Outreach Branch at the United Nations Statistics Division, where she oversees the work of the Statistics Division on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ms. Perucci initiated her career in the UN as an adviser on gender and social statistics. Since then, she has served in different positions within the UN system, where she has been an active leader in developing and promoting the use of statistics and indicators to inform development policies and review and monitor progress, and has pioneered new ways of producing, analyzing and presenting data to be used effectively for policy making and to reach a broad range of users. Between 2002 and 2012, she was responsible for the UN programme on the global monitoring of the MDGs, and was later assistant Director of the UN Population Division, where her work focused on demographic analysis and the substantive support to the UN process on population and development. She was the lead author of the MDG Report from 2005 to 2012 and currently oversees the preparation of the yearly progress report on the SDGs. She has authored a number of articles and statistical manuals on social and gender statistics, and serves as an advisor and expert member for many organizations in the data sector, including the Thematic Research Network on Data and Statistics (TReNDS) of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres. He spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, where he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees. He has authored numerous bestseller books. His most recent book is Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (2020). Sachs was twice named as Time magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders, and was ranked by The Economist among the top three most influential living economists.