Leave No One Behind

Time for Specifics on the Sustainable Development Goals

Homi Kharas, John W. McArthur, Izumi Ohno

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780815737841
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Economía del desarrollo

The ambitious 15-year agenda known as the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015 by all members of the United Nations, contains a pledge that "no one will be left behind." This book aims to translate that bold global commitment into an action-oriented mindset, focused on supporting specific people in specific places who are facing specific problems.

In this volume, experts from Japan, the United States, Canada, and other countries address a range of challenges faced by people across the globe, including women and girls, smallholder farmers, migrants, and those living in extreme poverty. These are many of the people whose lives are at the heart of the aspirations embedded in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. They are the people most in need of such essentials as health care, quality education, decent work, affordable energy, and a clean environment.

This book is the result of a collaboration between the Japan International Cooperation Research Institute and the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings. It offers practical ideas for transforming "leave no one behind" from a slogan into effective actions which, if implemented, will make it possible to reach the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. In addition to policymakers in the field of sustainable development, this book will be of interest to academics, activists, and leaders of international organizations and civil society groups who work every day to promote inclusive economic and social progress.

CHAPTER ONE

Getting Specific to Leave No One Behind on Sustainable Development

Homi Kharas, John W. McArthur, and Izumi Ohno

A Compelling Vision

A world free of extreme poverty. Societies that work for everyone. These are the aspirations embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the commitment to leave no one behind by 2030. The ambition was formalized in the joint agreement by all 193 United Nations (UN) member states, in September 2015, to pursue the SDGs. In paragraph 4 of the SDG Summit declaration, world leaders agreed:

As we embark on this great collective journey, we pledge that no one will be left behind. Recognizing that the dignity of the human person is fundamental, we wish to see the Goals and targets met for all nations and peoples and for all segments of society. And we will endeavour to reach the furthest behind first.

In a later part of the same declaration, under Goal 10 for reduced inequalities, world leaders further crystallized their commitment to inclusive societies. In target SDG 10.2, all countries made the pledge to “By 2030, empower and promote the social, economic, and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion, or economic or other status.” There is no ambiguity to the promise of sustainable development for all people.

Since 2015, the spirit of “leave no one behind” (LNOB) has garnered increasing traction across a growing number of constituencies. It might not be surprising that UN agencies have prominently adopted the LNOB slogan (e.g., UNDP 2018), but the concept has also started to take hold more broadly. Among national governments, sixteen described detailed LNOB efforts in their SDG voluntary national reviews presented at the UN in 2018.1 Prominent G-7 economies, such as Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom, have made their own specific public commitments to leaving no one behind.2 Leading intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations outside the UN have also published major LNOB reports (e.g., OECD 2018; Samman and others, 2018) and respective alliances of civil society organizations launched both the Leave No One Behind Partnership in 2016 and the Leave No One Behind Project in 2017. At a more technical level, the Leave No One Behind Data Collaborative focuses on promoting citizen-generated data and an “inclusive data charter.” Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, even has its own SDG-focused Leave No One Behind program in partnership with Grameen Australia, teaching social business and entrepreneurship.

Nonetheless, despite the growing resonance around the LNOB phrasing, it is not yet clear the world is implementing relevant policies with corresponding seriousness. For example, estimated numbers of chronically undernourished people have been rising for four years in a row, as of 2018.3 Aggregate official development assistance to the least developed countries has been declining.4 Meanwhile, challenges of absolute deprivation and exclusion persist in high-income countries too.5 And even though the rise of anti-elite political movements in many countries has heightened policy interest in ensuring all societies work for everyone, there are still too few signs of decisive gains in addressing the concerns of people feeling marginalized or left behind.

This edited volume represents an effort to treat LNOB as a serious commitment, with a special emphasis on problems of absolute deprivation and basic needs. Ultimately, LNOB requires clarity on the task at hand—a commitment to supporting specific people facing specific problems in specific places. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the empirical nature of the challenge. We then describe key insights generated by each chapter in focusing on many of the specific people, problems, and places that will define whether the world continues to leave large numbers of people behind in 2030.

The Empirical Nature of the Challenge

There is no single answer to the question of “how is the world doing on the SDGs?” The world shows too much variation across too many issues, indicators, and geographies for there to be any simplistic diagnosis of current status. Instead, any effort to leave no one behind needs to begin with an assessment of which people are facing which problems in which places. At a minimum, the scale and geographic distribution of each problem need to be considered.

To that end, a 2018 analysis by Kharas, McArthur, and Rasmussen considers country-level trend assessment of two dozen people-focused SDG indicators with adequate data for analysis. The study estimates the number of people slated to be left behind in each country on relevant SDG targets out to 2030. Here we draw from the same methods to present a summary assessment, in some cases drawing from more recent updates to underlying data sources, including the World Poverty Clock.6^, 7 To stress, our emphasis on people-focused economic and social indicators is only meant to drill down on the human dimensions of the LNOB challenge. It is not meant to detract in any way from other important SDG priorities focused on the environment or large-scale issues measured in terms of countries or international aggregates.

In this chapter, we follow the approach first laid out in McArthur and Rasmussen (2018) by distinguishing between two general categories of being left behind. The starkest form is premature death itself, so we group some indicators under a “life and death” category. The second form entails various forms of basic human needs—ranging from income to education to nutrition to equal access to opportunity across genders—that are essential for active and dignity-driven participation in society.

Life and Death Indicators

Figure 1-1 shows how the world is doing on a cross-section of life-and-death SDG targets, if current trends continue out to the deadline, generally 2030.8 A complete horizontal bar represents, at the 100 percent level, complete SDG success, meaning the full number of lives saved if all countries register the required rate of progress to meet the relevant target. The lighter shaded portion on the left side of the horizontal bar reflects the share of the target the world is currently on course to achieve. In the top bar, for example, the world is on course to save nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of the relevant number of lives for under-five child mortality. The second bar shows that maternal mortality is only on track to achieve slightly more than one-third (37 percent) of the agreed outcome. On both issues, the world is carrying forward targets that update global ambitions since those included under the predecessor Millennium Development Goals.

The remaining indicators of figure 1-1 are all part of the SDGs’ distinctive contributions to the international policy agenda. Target 3.4, for example, aims to reduce premature noncommunicable disease mortality rates by one-third compared to 2015. The world is currently on track to save only 30 percent of the lives required to meet that objective. Recent prospects are even worse for cutting suicide, another part of target 3.4, by the same amount. For traffic deaths, SDG target 3.6 aims at a 50 percent global reduction by 2020. When this objective is applied at the country level, figure 1-1 shows just how little progress the world has so far been on course to make.

Each SDG target embedded in figure 1-1 represents a different type of issue faced by a different range of people. In that regard, figure 1-2 shows the cumulative number of lives at stake on each of the same indicators, from 2019 through to 2030 or corresponding deadline year. “Lives at stake” is defined as the cumulative difference, in each country, between the number of people who will, under current trends, die by 2030, and the number of people who will die if each country achieves the relevant SDG target. When added up, the figure shows that approximately 44 million lives are at stake overall. Nearly two-thirds of these lives—more than 29 million—are estimated as premature deaths due to noncommunicable diseases. The second largest number of lives, at more than 9 million, is composed of children under five. Challenges of suicide, homicide, maternal mortality, and traffic deaths each account for between 1 and 2 million lives at stake.

Figure 1-1. World Performance on SDG Life-and-Death Targets under Current Trend Out to 2030

Notes: (P) indicates proxy target used as 50 percent reduction for homicide. Traffic deaths are cumulative 2016 to 2020; maternal mortality applies the global target of 70 deaths per 100,000 live births to each country.

Source: Results update those previously presented in Kharas, McArthur, and Rasmussen (2018). Underlying data are from UN-DESA (2017), UN Statistics Division (2018), World Bank (2019), WHO (2018).

Figure 1-2. Number of Lives at Stake under SDG Life-and-Death Targets—Cumulative 2019–2030

Notes: (P) indicates proxy target used as 50 percent reduction for homicide. Traffic deaths are cumulative over 2019 and 2020; maternal mortality applies the global target of 70 deaths per 100,000 live births to each country.

Source: Results update those previously presented in Kharas, McArthur, and Rasmussen (2018). Underlying data are from UN-DESA (2017), UN Statistics Division (2018), World Bank (2019), WHO (2018).

Basic Needs Indicators

Figure 1-3 presents success ratios corresponding to those in figure 1-1, but now for a range of basic needs indicators. Note that here the number of people left behind is generally estimated only for the final target year, 2030, in order to avoid double-counting. The exception is for HIV infections and tuberculosis infections, which are reported as cumulative gaps from 2016 through 2030. Overall, the estimates in figure 1-3 suggest the world is on course to meet the needs of half the relevant population on only one of the indicators assessed: access to electricity. On the other sixteen indicators, the world is on course to cover less than half the needed ground. Extreme poverty, for example, is on trend to see only 43 percent of the relevant population have their incomes grow above the threshold of US$1.90 per day (in 2011 purchasing power parity dollars). The bottom horizontal bar, for children overweight, shows that the world is actually moving in the wrong direction, since underlying numbers are growing in the vast majority of countries.

Figure 1-4 translates the percentage gaps from figure 1-3 into estimates of the numbers of people grappling with the specific problems reflected by each indicator. For most indicators, the figure again represents a snapshot of the estimated population size still grappling with an issue as of the year 2030. Note that the population reference group differs by indicator, and some individuals might struggle with multiple dimensions of basic needs, so numbers here are not strictly additive or comparable across rows. Sanitation and undernourishment, for example, are measured relative to total population, while children overweight is measured in terms of the much smaller number of children aged two to four years old.

The top bar in figure 1-4 indicates 3.6 billion people suffering from mortality-augmenting air pollution. That number is calculated based on a proxy target of cutting each country’s share of people living with air pollution by 50 percent by 2030, so it represents only around half the number of people on trajectory to suffer from the problem that year. The next bar, based on women’s representation in government, suggests a gap of nearly 2 billion women and girls still subjected to a lack of equal leadership opportunities in society. This is based on a very coarse assumption that lack of opportunities for women in political leadership reflects a generalized proportionate lack of life opportunities for all women and girls. Meanwhile, an estimated 470 million women aged fifteen to forty-nine will lack access to family planning, and more than 380 million women aged fifteen and older will still be victims of intimate partner violence.

The figure also shows that nearly 2 billion people are on track to be left without sanitation by 2030. More than 650 million people will still be undernourished; nearly 600 million people will lack access to drinking water; more than 570 million people will lack access to electricity; and more than 490 million people will still live in extreme income poverty. Meanwhile, unless trends improve, by 2030 more than 10 million people will be newly infected with HIV and more than 54 million with tuberculosis. An estimated 114 million people will not even have had their births registered—a troubling administrative variant of lives not being counted equally.

Figure 1-3. World Performance on Basic SDG Needs Targets by 2030, under Current Trends

Notes: (P) indicates proxy target used: 50 percent reduction for air pollutions; WHO (2015) target of 90 percent reduction applied to each country for malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV infections; parity for gender representation in public leadership. Figures are for 2030 except HIV and tuberculosis, for which figures are cumulative over 2016 to 2030.

Source: Results update those previously presented in Kharas, McArthur, and Rasmussen (2018). Underlying data are from GBD (2017), UN-DESA (2017), World Bank (2019), World Data Lab (2019).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Getting Specific to Leave No One Behind on Sustainable Development
• Part I: People
• Part II: Problems
• Part III: Places
• On Politics
• Contributors
• Index