Giving Compass' Take:

• The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Goalkeeper's Report 2019 breaks down exactly how gender and geography determine outcomes and impact development. 

• How can funders use this information to direct effective development programs?

• Read a guide to funding gender equality. 

If you think about life as a journey, every single disadvantage makes the journey harder. Our path forward has been relatively clear of obstacles. For a girl born in the Sahel, one of the poorest regions in the world, getting to a healthy, productive life requires overcoming hurdle after hurdle after hurdle.

We believe that’s wrong. Every person should have an equal opportunity to lead a healthy, productive life.

For the past 20 years, we’ve invested in health and development in low-income countries, because the worst inequality we’ve ever seen is children dying from easily preventable causes. In the United States, we’ve invested primarily in education, because a good school is a key to success, but you’re less likely to have access to one if you’re low-income, a student of color, or both.

Goalkeepers is our annual report card on the world’s progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 17 ambitious goals the member states of the United Nations committed to reaching by 2030. As we write, billions of people are projected to miss the targets that we all agreed represent a decent life. If we hope to accelerate progress, we must address the inequality that separates the lucky from the unlucky.

Each time we zoom, we see yet another layer of disadvantage. These disadvantages don’t need to pile up on top of one another to make life hard—but when they do, as for the marginalized girl in Chad, the effect is brutal.

What is her life like? The data says she has probably been close to starving to death several times. The odds are that she never got the nutrients her body and brain needed to develop fully. It is likely that she can’t read or write, and that she will get pregnant well before she turns 20, although her body won’t be ready for the rigors of childbirth.

And when the time comes, there is a good chance she will give birth alone.

She deserves a better life. And we believe she can have one, as long as the world understands the many challenges she faces and gets to work on addressing them.

Read the full Goalkeepers Report 2019 at The Gates Foundation.