The uphill battle against poverty

As we look ahead to 2025, the international community's aspiration to end poverty warrants closer attention.

- Hippolyte Fofack, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Jayati Ghosh, Indermit Gill, Justin Yifu Lin

This past fall, the United Nations held its Summit of the Future and sought to give momentum to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), warning that the world is on track to meet only 17% of the targets enshrined in the internationally agreed 2030 Agenda.

After the pandemic years, when tens of millions of people were pushed into poverty, the need for a renewed effort is obvious. But the fact is that most of the progress made against poverty occurred between 2000 and 2015—the years of the Millennium Development Goals—raising questions about the feasibility of today's targets, not to mention current approaches to development assistance. To assess the world's prospects for tackling humanity's oldest problem, we asked contributors to respond to the following proposition:

"Progress toward the world's 2030 poverty-reduction goals will continue to disappoint."

Hippolyte Fofack

Only one-third of countries are on track even to halve their national poverty levels this decade, and forecasts suggest that more than 600 million people will still be living in extreme poverty by 2030. Billions more will continue to face severe material deprivations and the consequences of the climate crisis. Today's world is characterized by the old dichotomy between developing and developed countries, and by a vast SDG financing gap—estimated at around $4 trillion per year.