Dr. Charles Owubah leads Action Against Hunger USA’s executive team in providing leadership and strategic direction.
Every turn of the calendar brings new hopes and fresh resolutions, yet 2025 is particularly significant: It marks just five years until 2030, the target for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
For context, the SDGs are a collection of 17 global goals set by the UN General Assembly in 2015 after considerable consultation with NGOs, companies and other stakeholders. Part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the SDGs address a broad range of social, economic and environmental challenges.
These goals are a blueprint for advancing a better and more sustainable future for all, and they are backed by 231 progress indicators, such as the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day. With five years left toward our collective resolution for the world, this is a critical moment to evaluate progress. How are we doing?
Progress And Pitfalls
A recent working paper from three Brookings researchers tracks 24 SDG-related indicators across 100 countries, finding real, notable improvements in many areas.
For example, the world is making progress on HIV incidence and antiretroviral coverage to treat AIDS. There’s also momentum around primary and secondary school completion rates, aided in part by gains in access to electricity and the internet. Access to family planning has increased while maternal mortality and under-five mortality both fell. There’s also been a surge in marine protected areas and, to a lesser degree, land-based conservation.
While these and other areas may be far from their targets, the good news is that progress is being made—yet there are six notable exceptions: food insecurity, undernourishment, malaria, traffic mortality, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and greenhouse gas emissions that impact climate change. The largest reversal relates to the goal of zero hunger, which is critical to people’s health, well-being and survival.
Priorities For Progress
The SDGs are interrelated and all are important, yet there’s a reason no poverty and zero hunger feature first and second among the Global Goals. Those two goals are directly related to many of the others.
For example, malnutrition plays a critical role when it comes to health. Malnutrition weakens the body’s ability to fight disease including vector-borne diseases like malaria. Diet is linked to NCDs like heart disease and diabetes, particularly in vulnerable communities. Hunger is also linked to climate change, which is contributing to rising food prices, lower crop yields and greater hunger. These areas are deeply interrelated.
In fact, malnutrition is a common thread that connects five of the six Brookings-identified areas where progress on the SDGs has reversed. Why should we care, and what can we do?
The Need For Leadership
First, we need to realize that hunger is not only a moral issue; it also impacts economic growth and international security. As leaders, we should understand that hunger can directly impact organizational success, regardless of your mission.
If your organization advances education or the arts, you likely have seen that it’s harder to learn or appreciate culture when you’re hungry. If you focus on international affairs, it’s important to realize that food and the means to produce it (labor, water, trade) will increasingly factor into cross-border relations. Mental health? Hunger has a direct impact. Animals? People who can’t feed themselves also struggle to feed their animal companions, and in developing contexts, the drivers of hunger also can put wildlife at risk. The list goes on. Again, addressing hunger is key to progress in other areas, too.
As a sector, we can encourage action that will help close the gap on these lagging SDGs. Here are three examples:
• Scale What Works: We should look to the lessons from the past decade to identify what has worked best. As leaders, we should look at the track records of our own organizations to more systematically identify promising projects that would benefit from additional resourcing. We can also look to our peers, local communities and social enterprises, innovative programs in academia and beyond. Now is the time to collaborate to rapidly scale our most promising and proven interventions—and to work across sectors on the effort.
• Spotlight The SDGs: NGO leaders have an important role to play in refocusing attention on the SDGs. The Global Goals are a framework for accountability, and we must forge action plans to close the gap between the world’s promise in 2015 and where things stand today. Nonprofit leaders should use our collective voice to advocate for Global Goals that remain relevant today.
• Close The Funding Gap: Even among countries dealing with crisis levels of malnutrition, funding doesn’t come close to meeting urgent needs, let alone supporting programs that have proven effective at hunger prevention. Closing that gap would deliver economic benefits that far outweigh the costs, as the World Bank reports that “for every dollar invested in addressing undernutrition, a return of $23 is expected.” This will require intensifying multidimensional work long underway, including work to increase public awareness, advocacy at every level of government in the U.S. and internationally, and efforts to enlist new donors. The good news is that the U.S. public expresses solid bipartisan support for the issue.
These actions—and others—are urgent. The Brookings report has underscored what I see every day: Meaningful progress is possible. That’s why this is the perfect time to set a New Year’s resolution, one that can extend to 2030 and beyond.
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