How well is Africa doing across the Sustainable Development Goals?

Two strong narrative threads are shaping the global development discourse heading into 2025. One is an ongoing concern that the world is far off course from reaching most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.¹ Another is that lower-income countries are being left behind as growth slows and conflict and debt service pressures rise.²

Figure 13 below links these two narratives together, with a specific focus on Africa. In a recent report on country-by-country SDG progress, we and our colleague Odera Onyechi review what has happened to two dozen quantifiable benchmarks.³ We conduct a range of empirical assessments to distill trends, including a simple before-and-after test on the indicators, showing the human consequences of changes as of 2023 relative to 2015. The figure extracts Africa-specific results from the analysis and shows a cross section of people-focused indicators ordered according to the continent’s progress. Green bars show overall improvements in the number of people affected since 2015, and red bars show declines.

The chart draws attention to the wide range of issue-specific SDG trends across Africa. For instance, the green bar furthest to the right shows that, across countries with available data, Africa reduced the number of people without antiretroviral therapy (ART) coverage by an estimated 69% since 2015, from 11.3 million to 3.5 million. Similarly, the annual incidence of HIV infections dropped by nearly half, from 1.1 million in 2015 to 597,000 in 2023. Conversely, the red bar furthest to the left indicates 78% more Africans faced food insecurity in 2023—236 million compared to 132 million in 2015. Estimates of undernourishment also worsened by 55%, climbing from 193 million Africans in 2015 to 300 million in 2023.

The figure also compares Africa’s progress with that of the rest of the world. For each indicator, shaded bars show estimates of changes since 2015 for countries outside of Africa (again for those with available data). The pattern is clear. Compared to the rest of the world, Africa is being left behind on almost all assessed indicators. This is despite the continent having registered important gains since 2015 on issues like under-5 child mortality, access to electricity, and access to the internet. But in several areas—poverty reduction, access to sanitation, malaria incidence, obesity, secondary schooling completion, noncommunicable disease (NCD) mortality, and access to family planning—the number of Africans facing challenges is growing, as indicated by a red bar, while other regions are making progress, albeit slowly. 

Africa’s global leadership is most prominent on two issues where it is clearly outperforming the rest of the world—expanding ART coverage for people with HIV/AIDS and reducing HIV incidences. In both cases, action and funding have been prioritized by national and global institutions, with countries like Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo showing some of the world’s greatest accelerations in ART progress since 2015. Africa is also outpacing the world in reducing tuberculosis infections.

The human consequences of global shortfalls offer a sharp reminder of the stakes embedded in the SDGs. If recent trends are extrapolated out to 2030 and compared to the targets for ending extreme poverty, food insecurity, and stunting, or gaining universal access to secondary education, sanitation, safe drinking water, and electricity, we find tens or hundreds of millions of people will be left behind on these basic needs. This is in addition to millions of excess deaths linked to shortfalls or NCD mortality, child mortality, traffic mortality, and maternal mortality.

Overall, the variations in progress show that good results can be achieved even in challenging operating environments. Strengthened implementation systems lie at the heart of better progress for the SDGs, bridging government, science, civil society, and the private sector. This has been done successfully for some issue areas, most notably in the health domain, but it must be done in many more areas if Africa’s sustainable development is to accelerate.