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Progress is a fact
In 2015, almost 200 countries got together and agreed to 17 goals for improving life on Earth. These Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) cover everything from climate action to eliminating hunger, with 2030 set as the target year for meeting them. This Tuesday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released its annual report on how the world is doing when it comes to the SDGs.
The bad news: Forecasting 15 years into the future, no one expected a worldwide pandemic or a war in Ukraine that would threaten food stability in Africa. These events have caused real setbacks in our progress toward the SDGs. The good news: Tracking across the past 30 years, we have still improved when it comes to almost every goal.
For example, with the exception of the last bullet point below, which includes data from the last decade only, these are some of the changes we have made since 1990:
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The share of the global population with access to clean water and sanitation has increased by 100 percent.
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Children under five are now around 30 percent less likely to be stunted or malnourished.
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Maternal deaths per 100,000 live births have declined by 40 percent.
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The prevalence of 15 neglected tropical diseases, like dengue and leprosy, has declined by more than 70 percent.
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76 percent of adults worldwide now own a financial account, up from 51 percent a decade ago. (In developing countries, 71 percent of adults now own a financial account, representing a 30-percentage point increase over the last decade.)
As journalist Derek Thompson put it in an Atlantic piece about the report, “it is hard to argue that human progress is some sort of sales pitch from the pathologically optimistic. Progress is simply a fact.”
It’s unlikely that we’ll meet the SDGs by 2030—the report says we would need to multiply our current pace by five to do so. But the same principle of unknowability that made it impossible to predict this decade’s crises applies to good fortune as well. “No projection can ever account for the possibility of game-changing innovation,” Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates write in the introduction, “because when those breakthroughs happen, they change all the fundamental assumptions embedded in that equation.”
You can take a spin through the report yourself here. It’s user-friendly.
A side note on vaccines
Another bright figure from the report is that we have cut the percent of children who die before reaching five years old in half, from 8 percent in 1990 to 3.6 percent in 2021. Speaking to Thompson in The Atlantic, Bill Gates attributed the success to getting “vaccines out to almost all of the children in the world.”
In that vein, we were thrilled this week by the announcement of the most effective malaria vaccine yet. It’s the first one to reach—and surpass—the World Health Organization’s efficacy target of 75 percent. Production is waiting on results from a larger trial, but ideally should begin in 2023.
And another vaccine that Gates himself has his eye on is one that prevents pneumonia, the leading cause of death among children under five.
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