Giving Compass' Take:

· The Brookings Institution reports on the progress made by Africa towards the SDGs and highlights some of the key obstacles to achieving them.

· What goals has Africa made progress on? What barriers are preventing Africa from continuing progress? How can donors break these barriers and improve this situation? 

· Check out this article to read more about this topic.

On June 14, the Sustainable Development Goals Center for Africa released its 2019 Index and Dashboards Report, which assesses the impact of government efforts on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The assessment covers data gaps, national strategies, budgeting practices, stakeholder engagement, coordination at the executive level, and legislative actions throughout 52 African countries (Seychelles and Libya are excluded for lack of data). This year’s report repeats previous SDG Center for Africa assessments that rank North Africa as the best-performing region on the continent and Central Africa as the worst-performing region, though individual countries have reached different levels of progress towards each of the 17 goals.

One major finding of the report is that the majority of African countries are on track to reach only one SDG, SDG 13, which concerns taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. As the SDG Index Ranking itself is a measurement of the adoption of policies and not their results, progress toward SDG 13 does not indicate empirical progress toward combating climate change’s effects or related SDGs, such as ensuring access to affordable and clean energy (SDG 7), conserving and sustainable use of marine resources (SDG 14), and protecting and restoring land resources and ecosystems (SDG 15). Table 1 shows African countries’ advancements toward the SDGs, providing a generalized picture of progress and which goals require significant action.

Read the full article about progress on the SDGs in Africa by Genevieve Jesse and Dhruv Gandhi at The Brookings Institution.