From the article:
"In 2015 the world's leaders committed to a sweeping set of targets to lift the world's poorest citizens into a decent life by 2030. Four years later, it's clear that the world is nowhere near on track to meet these 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and millions of children still face a lifetime of inequality because of factors such as where they are born, their gender and their race.
That's the conclusion of a new report by the Gates Foundation — its latest annual scorecard of progress toward the SDGs.
The findings echo assessments in previous years by not just the foundation, but the United Nations and other analysts. But that merely underscores the urgency of shifting strategies before it's too late, says Masood Ahmed, president of the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank.
'No surprise is not a reason for no concern,' he says. (The Gates Foundation is a funder of the Center for Global Development, as well as of NPR and this blog. Neither Ahmed nor his organization were involved with producing the Gates report.)
Both Ahmed and the Gates report take pains to make the case that the current challenges do not mean that ending poverty is an impossible task. After all, countries have achieved staggering improvements over the past three decades.
The problem is that the progress has largely tapered off. 'The glass is half full, but there are clearly some groups that are turning out to be much harder to reach,' Ahmed says.
For instance, worldwide, the share of people below the poverty line — meaning they have only $1.90 per day or less to live on — dropped from 36% in 1990 to 8% in 2018. But while the SDGs call for getting that down to zero, current projections are that by 2030, 7% of people will remain in poverty...
Ahmed, of the Center for Global Development, says this view is gaining ground due to a shifting assessment of how much money will be available to accomplish the SDGs. Back when the goals were adopted, there was widespread optimism that there would soon be a flood of private investment in poor countries. The expectation, Ahmed says, was that international development organizations would use their funds to identify promising projects that private capital would actually then fund — with every dollar of public funds spent this way generating eight to nine times as much in private investment.
But this has not panned out. 'The fact is that the numbers are showing that a dollar in public investment is delivering closer to $1.50 in private investment,' Ahmed says.
He says, 'over the next five years we're going to have to confront harder and harder issues and trade-offs. But the human race has demonstrated the capacity to make progress under very hard conditions. So I'm fundamentally optimistic.'"