4 Topic Focus

To further highlight specific trends in funding towards statistical systems, the PRESS uses specific topic focuses. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of how support to statistics aligns with emerging priorities and evolving thematic areas within official aid flows directed towards statistics.

Having carefully prefiltered projects through the AI-based classification framework outlined in Section 3, topic-specific filters are then applied to identify projects of particular relevance. Because developing an AI classification process for every topic focus would be computationally resource-intensive, subsequent topic filtering is conducted using a targeted keyword-matching approach. Given the already high precision of the AI-based preselection, keyword matching provides a cost-efficient and sufficiently accurate method for identifying relevant projects within specific statistical subdomains.

The text processing underlying the topic filters follows the same principles outlined in Section 3.1. Project titles, short descriptions, and long descriptions are processed through text normalization, removing punctuation and harmonizing case, followed by language-sensitive lemmatization in English, French, Spanish, and German. Keywords corresponding to the selected topics (see Appendix Keywords and Acronyms) are then matched against these processed texts to flag relevant projects. This ensures a consistent and multilingual application of topic filters across the PRESS database.

For PRESS 2025, two topics were selected to illustrate current trends in the use of data and technology in development cooperation: AI and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). The inclusion of AI reflects the rapidly increasing investment in digital innovation, data governance, and AI-enabled systems within the development aid landscape. Donors are increasingly supporting projects that explore AI applications for official statistics, early warning systems, and public service delivery—making it an emerging frontier in statistical capacity development. The DHS topic focus captures the continuing central role of large-scale household surveys in generating population and health data for monitoring progress toward the SDGs. With many countries conducting new DHS rounds during this period, this topic provides valuable insights into sustained investments in data production for policy-relevant evidence.