At halfway point, world is decades behind its own 2030 SDG targets
A medic helps a resident onto a platform of the digital X-ray machine during tuberculosis (TB) screening at Magadi Catholic Church in Kisumu County in March 2021. TB is treatable.
President of the Copenhagen Consensus and Visiting Fellow
Stanford University's Hoover Institution
What you need to know:
In 2015, when the world replaced the MDGs, things went wrong. World leaders could again have chosen to focus on a few, crucial targets. They could even have kept the same targets since they are important.
We could have focused on pinpointing where the needs are deepest and the opportunities greatest.
Instead, the United Nations and world leaders came up with a hodge-podge, absurdly long list of 169 targets for the world to achieve from 2015-2030: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In 2000, something remarkable happened: The world came together and committed to a short list of ambitious targets which became known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The objectives—to reduce poverty, fight disease, keep children in school and so on—essentially boiled down to eight specific verifiable goals, subject to a hard deadline of 2015.
