In adopting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, world leaders resolved to free humanity from poverty, secure a healthy planet for future generations, and build peaceful, inclusive societies as a foundation for ensuring lives of dignity for all. This collective journey has at its heart a promise to leave no one behind. The 2030 Agenda is deliberately ambitious and transformational, with a set of 17 integrated and indivisible Sustainable Development Goals and targets to guide us. Crucially, it is a universal agenda, applying to all countries; even the richest have yet to fully ensure women’s rights, conquer inequality or safeguard the environment. Implementation has begun, but the clock is ticking. This report shows that the rate of progress in many areas is far slower than needed to meet the targets by 2030.

Focused actions are needed to lift the 767 million people who still live on less than 1.90 US dollars a day, and to ensure food security for the 793 million people who routinely confront hunger. We need to double the rate at which we are reducing maternal deaths. We need more determined progress towards sustainable energy and greater investments in sustainable infrastructure. And we need to bring quality education within reach of all; if all children in low-income countries completed upper secondary school by 2030, per capita income would increase by 75 percent by 2050 and we could advance the fight to eliminate poverty by a full decade.

Gender inequality is still deeply entrenched, as manifested in the slow progress in women’s representation in political life, in decision-making within their own households, and in the violence, most often with impunity, that women and girls face in all societies. Young people continue to face alarmingly high rates of unemployment, and their voices are yet to be sufficiently included in the deliberations affecting their lives and futures.