Figure of the week: Poverty and health care SDG projections in sub-Saharan Africa

On January 8, the Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings released its annual Foresight Africa publication. This year’s special edition focuses on six key priorities for the next decade. The first chapter, Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: The state of play and policy options, highlights recent progress and challenges facing the continent in achieving Agenda 2030.

In his essay, Belay Begashaw, Director-General of the Sustainable Development Goals Center for Africa, highlights that progress so far on the SDGs has been uneven across countries, goals, and targets and notes the need to redouble efforts. He emphasizes the importance of localizing the SDGs and integrating them within the local, national, and regional planning processes including the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

Given the current state of progress on the SDGs and the need for additional efforts, Figure 1.2 in the report highlights several scenarios for poverty and health care SDG targets. The “if we progress” and “if we regress” scenarios highlight how sub-Saharan Africa would perform in 2030 based on the 85th and 15th percentile district-level annualized data from 2000-2017. As the figure shows, sub-Saharan Africa has made progress on all five indicators since 1990; however, based on projections through 2030, the region remains off track overall.