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Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere
The very first Sustainable Development Goal is to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. Like all the SDGS, this goal has sub-targets — they are listed below from the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
1.1 By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day
1.2 By 2030, reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions
1.3 Implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, and by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable
1.4 By 2030, ensure that all men and women, in particular the poor and the vulnerable, have equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to basic services, ownership and control over land and other forms of property, inheritance, natural resources, appropriate new technology and financial services, including microfinance
1.5 By 2030, build the resilience of the poor and those in vulnerable situations and reduce their exposure and vulnerability to climate-related extreme events and other economic, social and environmental shocks and disasters
1.A Ensure significant mobilization of resources from a variety of sources, including through enhanced development cooperation, in order to provide adequate and predictable means for developing countries, in particular least developed countries, to implement programmes and policies to end poverty in all its dimensions
1.B Create sound policy frameworks at the national, regional and international levels, based on pro-poor and gender-sensitive development strategies, to support accelerated investment in poverty eradication actions
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/
Goal 1 and the recent Nobel Prize in Economics Winners
Abhijit Banerjee, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA; Esther Duflo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA; and Michael Kremer, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA are the winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
The full press release is available here, please cite: Press release: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2019. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. Tue. 15 Oct 2019. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2019/press-release/; and a portion of the release has been reproduced below.
The research conducted by this year’s Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research.
Despite recent dramatic improvements, one of humanity’s most urgent issues is the reduction of global poverty, in all its forms. More than 700 million people still subsist on extremely low incomes. Every year, around five million children under the age of five still die of diseases that could often have been prevented or cured with inexpensive treatments. Half of the world’s children still leave school without basic literacy and numeracy skills.
This year’s Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. In brief, it involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions – for example, the most effective interventions for improving educational outcomes or child health. They have shown that these smaller, more precise, questions are often best answered via carefully designed experiments among the people who are most affected.
In the mid-1990s, Michael Kremer and his colleagues demonstrated how powerful this approach can be, using field experiments to test a range of interventions that could improve school results in western Kenya.
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, often with Michael Kremer, soon performed similar studies of other issues and in other countries. Their experimental research methods now entirely dominate development economics.
The Laureates’ research findings – and those of the researchers following in their footsteps – have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice. As a direct result of one of their studies, more than five million Indian children have benefitted from effective programmes of remedial tutoring in schools. Another example is the heavy subsidies for preventive healthcare that have been introduced in many countries.
Press release: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2019. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. Tue. 15 Oct 2019. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2019/press-release/
These are just two examples of how this new research has already helped to alleviate global poverty. It also has great potential to further improve the lives of the worst-off people around the world.
