The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by world leaders in 2015, committed countries to mobilize efforts to end all forms of poverty, fight inequalities and tackle climate change by 2030, while ensuring that no one is left behind. Monitoring the SDGs is central to making progress in their implementation. However, the implementation of the SDGs needs a lot of concentrated effort, posing many challenges.
The biggest challenge in the implementation is the lack of critical data (information) for global, regional and national development policymaking. Many governments still do not have access to adequate data on their entire populations.
On the other hand, Sentiment Analysis is a data analysis based on decision making techniques, which measures the inclination of people’s opinions through Natural Language Processing (NLP), computational linguistics and text analysis. This technique is used to extract and analyze subjective information from the Web, mostly social media and similar sources. Due that social media in one of the biggest sources of data, this document explores how Sentiment Analysis on social media data can contribute to the implementation of the SDGs.
Use case: Immigration in Colombia and Costa Rica – Sentiment Analysis approach
The topic of immigration has always surfaced as a priority and a concern for many countries across the globe. Immigration is described as the movement from one’s country to another where you don’t possess citizenship. It can either be legal or illegal depending on the channels one has gone through to migrate. It can contribute hugely to the ever-expanding diversity and economy of any given country. Immigration reforms are crucial since they can help a country move towards a unified nation. Immigration is termed as a key factor in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as it is a “… powerful poverty reduction tool, which can contribute to the achievement of all SDGs”.
The contribution of migration to sustainable development is recognized by the UN through the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 10 out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) contain targets and indicators that are relevant to migration, the Agenda’s core principle being to “leave no one behind”, including migrants.
A lot of research has been done in this context, informing about migration in Costa Rica and in Colombia. However, none specifies the different issues that are facing immigrants in these two countries. This study case has been performed to help solve the previous insufficiency through a Twitter opinion based Sentiment Analysis approach.
