By John McArthur and Krista Rasmussen.

A core ambition of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—the economic, social, and environmental objectives affirmed by all U.N. member states in September 2015—is to end extreme poverty in all forms by 2030. Now that a year has passed since the establishment of the Goals, it is timely to assess how close each country stands to achieving the objective, defined as universal access to basic human needs. To that end, this policy brief presents current trajectories for 193 countries across a variety of key SDG targets. We focus on indicators with available data that were also previously addressed under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from 2000 through 2015.

Overall, the analysis tackles three questions:

1. What is each country’s current 2030 trajectory for each target?
2. What are each country’s current prospects across targets?
3. For the most off track countries and targets, is there a recent precedent for SDG success?

The results build on previous forward-looking assessments of individual targets (FAO, 2015; UNESCO, 2016; You et al., 2015; Alkema et al., 2016) and aggregate global trends (Nicolai et al., 2015). To our knowledge, this is the first systematic attempt to present country-level 2030 trajectories across several extreme poverty-relevant SDG targets. Importantly, it considers countries at all income levels, consistent with the SDGs’ emphasis on the universal challenges of sustainable development.