Giving Compass' Take:

• Brookings discusses the Sustainable Development Goals that are "people focused" and crunches the numbers to see where there is still room for improvement.

• How can aid and humanitarian organizations push for more progress for the SDGs? Taking a close look at the gaps will help target efforts more efficiently and effectively.

• Here's why now is a new era of partnerships and alliances for the SDGs.

Ministers are gathering next week in New York at the United Nations’ High Level Political Forum to discuss progress being made on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The goals are intentionally inspirational; promises made by all countries to their citizens to improve the prospects for people, planet, and prosperity. In recent research, we have been examining the SDG targets that squarely focus on measurable improvements in people’s lives — to ensure no one is left behind. We wanted to understand how many people the world is currently on track to help by 2030, and how many people the world is on a path to leave behind.

Our study focuses on 21 “people-focused” SDG targets — those expressed in terms of measurable outcomes for a quantifiable number of people. Importantly, we distinguish between types of targets across two dimensions. First, we segment targets defined in absolute terms (e.g., ending extreme poverty, measured by a zero poverty headcount rate) from those defined in relative terms (e.g., cutting traffic deaths by half). Second, we distinguish between targets focused on “life and death” issues (e.g., child mortality, non-communicable disease mortality) and those focused on “basic needs” that are essential for a decent quality of life (e.g., proper nutrition, access to sanitation, gender equality of opportunity). We note that this approach is not able to address other important geography-based SDG environmental questions (e.g., climate change, oceans) or aggregation-based outcomes (e.g., Gini measures of inequality or economic growth).

Our methodology allows us to estimate how each country and issue — and in turn the world — is doing compared to the ambitions enshrined in the SDG target.

Read the full article about the trends and gaps in the SDGs by Homi Kharas, John McArthur, and Krista Rasmussen at Brookings.