‘Incredible Ingenuity And Potential In Africa’
Q. Your foundation has just released the Goalkeepers 2022 Report: The Future Of Progress that tracks the progress of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There's data and diligence, but seven years in, how are we doing? Has anything changed?
A. These goals were set because they're ambitious. We were making substantial progress on a number of them before the pandemic hit. But I'm sorry to say that since the pandemic, it has set back every single goal that was set. That's how devastating this pandemic has been. So we need to take that in as a world and say ‘that's a setback, but also what's possible’. And I think one of the things that still makes us hopeful as a foundation is we see the incredible progress that was made before: the deaths of children under five going down, malaria going down, and more people on HIV/AIDS treatments than ever before. And we believe that we can make progress again. But as a world, we've got to invest now, because unless we do, you're going to see millions of people who do not get their livelihoods back or do not reach their full potential because of the devastating impacts.
Q. You visited Africa in June, your first visit post-pandemic. What were
