Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations recently released a set of goals to be met by 2030. Named the "Sustainable Development Goals," there are 17 targets that together, would improve the overall quality of life of each and every citizen of the world. The broad goals are:

1. Eliminate extreme poverty - that is, no one in the world will live on less than $1.25/day
2. Eliminate hunger from this world, and improve food security
3. Enable people to lead a healthy life
4. Provide quality education to all
5. Promote gender equality, and female empowerment
6. Promote a sustainable management of water resources and sanitation
7. Provide energy to all
8. Ensure sustainable and inclusive economic growth
9. Create sound infrastructure that allows for industrialization
10. Reduce the level of inequality between and inside countries
11. Improve quality of life in cities
12. Promote sustainable production and consumption of resources
13. Tackle climate change
14. Promote conservation in oceans
15. Promote sustainable land use
16. Develop societies that are peaceful and inclusive
17. Ensure countries work together to achieve sustainable goals.

These are without doubt, very ambitious targets. These goals imply that just raising incomes will not bring prosperity among others. So, other indices of well-being must be measured besides income. Besides implementing these goals, policymakers should establish proper measurement techniques to track the progress of each goal.

These indices can be used to effectively measure the progress of these goals:

1. the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) can be used to create one index that can aggregate the progress of different dimensions of deprivation, such as income, hunger, clean water,
2. the multidimensional human opportunity index can be used to track the level of access of different services, like access to energy, schools, hospitals and other public institutions.
3. The elasticity of growth measures can be used to see if there is inclusive growth in countries
4. Measuring air, water, and land quality should determine how effectively we are conserving the environment.

Tracking the progress periodically can help policymakers gauge where they are and what they need to do to improve the lives of people. Thus, besides spending money on meeting these goals, governments and development partners should spend considerable amount of money on data collection and progress reports.