[This essay was first published by the Gates Foundation]
We are data people, and this is a data report. Sort of.
In 2015, leaders from 193 countries agreed to the Sustainable Development Goals—the SDGs. These were big, bold objectives we wanted to achieve by 2030, everything from ending poverty to achieving gender equality. And each year, this report attempts to answer the question, “How is the world doing?” We want people to grasp what the numbers say about the trajectory of human progress.
But this year, we think it’s just as important that people understand what the numbers cannot say about progress.
Because there are two important things no data point in this report fully reflects: crisis and innovation.
When development experts around the world hammered out the SDGs seven years ago, they had no idea that in four years’ time, a novel virus would jump into the human population, sparking a once-in-a-century pandemic. They didn’t anticipate that wars would begin in Ukraine or Yemen—or that from Afghanistan to the United States, the rights of women would be hurled back decades.
As it stands now, we’d need to speed up the pace of our progress five times faster to meet most of our goals—and even that might be an underestimate, because some of the projections don’t yet account for the impact of the pandemic, let alone the war in Ukraine or the food crisis it kicked off in Africa.
As bad as the data makes it seem, the real situation might be even worse.
Or it might be better.
Because what’s also not reflected in the numbers is the potential for human ingenuity.
No projection can ever account for the possibility of game-changing innovation because when those breakthroughs happen, they change all the fundamental assumptions embedded in that equation. The math breaks down (in a good way).
Look what happened with HIV.
Before the Sustainable Development Goals, there were the Millennium Development Goals—the MDGs—and one was reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS. This seemed impossible at the time, but thanks to the hard work and ingenuity of a coalition of advocates, governments, and others, we rapidly accelerated progress. From 2000 to 2020, we saw a nearly 60% reduction in yearly deaths.
We believe it’s possible that one day we will look back at the data in this report the same way we look at the AIDS data from the turn of the millennium: in disbelief at how quickly and dramatically things turned around.
“Human ingenuity can render our careful projections irrelevant and make our boldest aspirations seem timid.”
—Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates
Human ingenuity can render our careful projections irrelevant and make our boldest aspirations seem timid. In the following essays, we write about how new ways of thinking about two old problems—food security and gender equality—can do just that. Of the 17 SDGs, these two might have the biggest delta between what we’re on track to achieve and what we can achieve—because of the potential for breakthroughs.
There are times in history when the path of progress is predictable and linear; when you can predict what will happen tomorrow based on what occurred today. But we do not live in those times.
During the first half of the SDG era, we saw how unexpected crises could set back progress in unanticipated ways.
Will we see the opposite in the SDG era’s second half?
Will humanity show how it can accomplish what everyone previously thought impossible and innovate our way out of a deep hole?
That’s up to all of us.
