End poverty in all its forms everywhere

IN September 2015, Heads of State will convene at the General Assembly of the United Nations to agree upon a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs). The first target of the first SDG proposed by the Open Working Group (OWG) of member states is to “radicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere” by 2030. The second target is to reduce at least by half the proportion of people living in poverty according to national definitions. These are noble and historic targets for global progress—they deserve their status at the top of the list. At the same time, they illustrate issues affecting a considerable number of the 169 development targets proposed by OWG, such as how do we measure them and are they plausible?

These two questions are linked. How we resolve the challenges of measurement will have a profound impact on the targets’ power to motivate as well as on the likelihood that those targets will be met. Poverty lines at the national and local level are frequently revised upward, and there are good reasons for this. This approach, however, risks the possibility that steady development progress will not yield poverty reduction, simply because the poverty line keeps moving too.