Global progress has been uneven on the major challenges facing the world today. We have made great strides in tackling issues such as nutrition and basic medical care as well as access to basic education. Yet tolerance and inclusion together with health and wellness have fallen behind, still crying out for more comprehensive solutions.

As countries move from low- to middle-income status, most are able to find solutions to the challenges of basic nutrition, reducing maternal and child mortality, tacking infectious diseases, and getting children into school.

That variation is one of the key findings of the 2016 Social Progress Index report released on June 28. The index provides a comprehensive measure of a country’s social and environmental performance, based on more than 50 indicators. The 2016 index covers 133 countries with complete data and 27 more with partial data, representing 99 percent of humanity.

Finland tops the index with a score of 90.09 out of 100; the Central African Republic is in last place scoring 30.03 out of 100. Summing together all country results, weighted by population size, we find that the world’s average social progress score is 62.88 — equivalent to that of Mongolia or Kyrgyzstan.

Image: Sivananthi Thanenthiran, Executive Director at the Asia-Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW, Malaysia), addresses the General Assembly High-level Thematic Debate on Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).