How do you deliver a vaccine campaign to slum dwellers who have no address? How do you deliver maternal health interventions when more than 200 million children around the world have not had their births registered? How do you deliver a nutrition intervention to Brazil’s poorest citizens who live off the grid in the Amazon Rim?

Many of the world’s most impoverished and marginalized live under just those conditions. Those who are at the base of the pyramid, the poorest of the poor, the most geographically distant and the most marginalized, are often the hardest to reach.

In 2015, the global development community unveiled its next agenda, the very ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The top SDG is explicit: End poverty in all its forms everywhere. “Everywhere” means ending poverty for all those who have been left behind.

Joseph Wong is the Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. 

Image: Poverty in Vietnam.