With four years left before the 2030 deadline, only 36% of the 139 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets are on track or showing moderate progress, nearly half (49%) are advancing far too slowly, and 15% have regressed compared with 2015 levels — with Sub-Saharan Africa facing an additional barrier as the region most exposed to sweeping cuts in official development assistance.
A United Nations report reviewing progress over the past decade warns that “progress remains uneven and insufficient” and that “without a decisive effort to rapidly scale up what works, the promise of the SDGs risks becoming unattainable.” The UN nevertheless highlighted “measurable gains” across all goals since their adoption in 2015, attributing them to “sustained investment, sound policies and international cooperation” — a combination that has “improved the lives of billions of people worldwide” and generated a global database of more than 3.2 million data points covering nearly every indicator, which the organisation described as “an important and often overlooked achievement” enabling countries to identify where progress is accelerating, where gaps persist, and which policies are delivering results.
Despite a financing shortfall the UN estimates at four trillion US dollars annually, and despite what it describes as “overlapping crises”, there are notable achievements to record. Nearly one billion people have gained access to safe drinking water, and 1.2 billion to improved sanitation. Electricity now reaches 92% of the global population. Internet access has risen sharply, from 40% to 74%. Social protection coverage has extended to more than half of the world’s population for the first time in history. And most regions are on course to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030 — with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand).
“More than a decade of implementation has shown what is possible,” said Li Junhua, UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs. He said the task now is to “scale up what works, with the urgency, investment and cooperation needed to fulfil the promise of the 2030 Agenda”, stressing the need to “accelerate the energy transition, harness frontier technologies — including artificial intelligence — for sustainable development, advance gender equality as a cross-cutting priority, and strengthen multilateral cooperation.”
To accelerate progress in the final stretch, the UN argues it is “essential to close the annual SDG financing gap of approximately four trillion dollars through the Seville Commitment and reform of the international financial architecture.” That task has become significantly harder: official development assistance, including funds previously channelled through the now-disbanded US aid agency USAID, fell 23.1% in 2025 — a historic record decline that has pushed aid flows back to levels close to those of 2015.
For Africa — described in the report as “the region of the world with the greatest aid dependence”, with assistance representing 3% of GDP in 2024 — the impact of the cuts is “profound, wide-ranging and donor-driven, leaving authorities with very little room for manoeuvre”, according to an analysis by four technical experts. The article underscores that the retrenchment in external financing is not the result of domestic policy failures but of decisions taken by donor countries, compounding an already difficult development environment across the continent.
The findings were published on Tuesday and form part of the UN’s broader assessment of SDG implementation ahead of the 2025 SDG Summit, which is expected to be a critical moment for world leaders to recommit to the framework and mobilise the resources needed to prevent the goals from slipping entirely out of reach before the decade’s end.
Source: Expansão / Original article: expansao.co.ao
