The clock is ticking for U.N. goals to end poverty — and it doesn't look promising
It was an ambitious promise: Back in 2015 the world's leaders gathered at the United Nations to commit to a set of targets that – taken together – would lift the world's most destitute, along with many of the rest of us, into a better life by the year 2030.
But almost immediately it became clear that the world was not moving fast enough to accomplish most of these 17 "sustainable development goals," or SDGs. Now, at the half-way point, with leaders once again gathered at the United Nations for its annual General Assembly meetings, multiple assessments of the SDGS – including scorecard reports by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations – find that for many of the SDGs progress has all but halted.
What does this mean for the broader effort to end global poverty? NPR spoke with Masood Ahmed, president of the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank. (This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
The world never really appeared on track to meet many of the SDG's. Then the pandemic hit. Where do things stand now?
The short answer is we are even less on track.
One side of it is all of these shocks the world has experienced: COVID, the war in Ukraine and its consequential impact on food and fuel prices, the increasingly visible consequences of climate change – most recently the floods in Pakistan and
