The proposed Sustainable Development Goals are achievable, but adopting a business-as-usual approach will leave us far short of the target, a new report by the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) says.

The report, released on April 13, concludes that the United Nations Sustainable Goals for 2020 are achievable, but only if rich countries live up to their promises, particularly on overseas aid.

The Institute therefore urges governments in developing countries to do more to obtain accurate figures of the numbers living in absolute poverty (on less than $1.25 per day), as it estimated as many as a quarter of the poorest are excluded from official figures and that the number of people living in extreme poverty is at least 350 million — higher than the official figures.

A key aspect of the report is that the ODI has actually costed what needs to be done to achieve the sustainable goals.

World’s richest

For example, free basic universal health care would cost $74 billion a year to deliver in poor countries — equivalent to 1.7 per cent of what the world’s richest countries spend on health care a year.

The researchers calculated that a “new social compact” comprising universal health, free primary and secondary education and income support to protect the poorest will cost around $148 billion in low-income countries. They argued the costs for this must be shared by both the rich and poor countries.

The report says that while there have been enormous strides in poverty reduction over the past two decades, progress will not be so easy in the coming years, as the poor are increasingly concentrated in conflict-prone states, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.

The report was launched ahead of the UN 2015 Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where governments will pledge funds to support the next set of global development targets.

The global financing summit planned for July “provides an opportunity to tackle the huge gaps in the delivery of basic services, like health and education,” the report says.

The authors argued that aid should support a global “minimum standard of living for all.” Existing finance, they add, should be focused on the delivery of this.

“If existing pledges on international aid were fulfilled, there would be more than enough to pay for the $73 billion shortfall,” ODI says.

The report’s author Romilly Greenhill said, “Aid is uniquely well-placed to support poor countries in their efforts to reach the poorest, including by providing free health care and education, and cash for those living below the poverty line. But to do this effectively, the aid industry will need to change.”

Extreme poverty

The report says that poor people are increasingly living in fragile states, but aid flows to these countries have not been keeping step. On current projections, if radical change does not occur, over half a billion people will still be in extreme poverty and four million children will die annually from lack of basic health care by 2030.

“Aid isn’t the answer to eradicating poverty — but it is an incredibly important part of the solution,” said Paddy Carter, co-lead author of the report.

“Without more aid delivered in the right way, in the right places, the goal of eradicating poverty will be out of reach.”

Apart from health, the report has some key recommendations in the field of education, which it says would help low-income countries to increase their economic growth.

“Using the latest country-by-country estimates from the 2015 Education for All report, we estimate that extending universal primary and lower secondary education to all in low-income countries would cost $32 billion per annum,” it says.

But the ODI report stresses that if richer countries are serious about the SDGs, they have to get serious about delivering 0.7 per cent of their gross national income as official development assistance.

“Spending an additional $84 billion annually on the social sectors would be possible if donors delivered on their 0.7 per cent promise and emerging providers scaled up their development assistance programmes,” the report says.

Donors must also strengthen the poverty focus of their aid programmes, ODI adds.

“Current development assistance flows are heavily skewed against those countries in the greatest need of support. If the group of low-income countries is ranked by income and divided in two, the richer half currently receives twice as much country-programmable ODA per person, on average, than the poorer half.”