Opinion: Ending extreme poverty is within reach. We can’t give up

World leaders are gathering at the United Nations this week, at the midway point of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, to evaluate stalled progress and talk about how to get us back on track. This means doing more of what has already been proven to work. The numbers don’t look good. The Sustainable Development Goals launched by the U.N. in 2015 set the ambitious target of eradicating extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $2.15 a day as goal No. 1. While there has been some improvement — in 2019, 8.5% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, down from 10.8% in 2015 — recent crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict, and escalating climate impacts, have pushed us backward. But this is not the time to give up hope. Extreme poverty is not an insurmountable problem. We have the resources and the tools at our disposal — the main question is whether we will put them to use. Many look at how we’ve come up short and either think the goals were way too ambitious, that we don’t have the money, or that we need new ideas. In our experience, none of that is true. The SDGs are right to be ambitious While the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030 might seem ambitious, it's worth noting that significant progress has been made over the last half century. People living in poverty at the current $2.15 line declined from over 2 billion in 1990 to 659 million in 2019. During the era of the Millennium Development Goals alone, nearly a billion people rose above $2.15 a day. Economic growth has played a role, but government action has been equally vital. In 2018, the World Bank estimated that 36% of people escaping extreme poverty did so because of government safety nets. “Real progress on the 2030 Agenda requires a massive, concerted push to scale solutions that work.” --— The money is there Financial constraints aren’t the primary problem either. Governments in the global south already spend tens of billions of dollars annually on anti-poverty programs. Between leveraging existing government systems in the global south more effectively, mobilizing domestic resources, and stepping up contributions from the global north, we can fill the financing gap for poverty eradication. Innovation is also important but not a key bottleneck. Research on global development, with thousands of studies, has enhanced our understanding of what works and what doesn’t. As we have repeatedly seen, our assumptions about what works can be wrong. We need to experiment, iterate, continuously learn and improve, and we need rigorous evidence to inform key decisions. But this is also not the main gap. From over two decades of scientific research, we now have solid evidence on policies and intervention that do work, but so much of that knowledge has not yet been fully applied. Let’s not reinvent the wheel A key example is the graduation approach — a global south-led approach combining the transfer of a large productive asset, coaching, and support — which has sustainably alleviated poverty in many different settings. We know this because our two organizations, along with a whole coalition of other groups, came together to design, rigorously study, and now scale the approach in countries around the world. Two landmark studies showed a large effect of the original program in Bangladesh and of its replication in six other countries. A 2021 paper on a randomized controlled trial found effects lasting 10 years later. So if the mission is possible, we have the resources, and we know what works, why are we off track, and what should we do to achieve SDG1? The answer is simple: The global community must double down on doing much more of what we already know works. Global leaders need the political will to focus on proven approaches. By doing so, existing funding will go so much further in achieving progress. To do this, we need to stop tinkering around the edges and address the lack of coordination and scale — one reason why we need global goals, however imperfect they are. In all the countries tackling extreme poverty, you’ll find hundreds or, depending, thousands of anti-poverty programs run by governments and NGOs alike, with often neither scale nor effectiveness. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel. Meanwhile, the few initiatives that have taken inspiration from effective approaches, such as the government-led Satat Jeevikoparjan Yojana program in Bihar, India, have achieved both scale and effectiveness. To date, this program, known locally as JEEViKA, has enabled 150,000 households to build sustainable livelihoods. Extreme poverty cannot be eradicated by relying on piecemeal development programming limited to the particular whims of different donors. Real progress on the 2030 Agenda requires a massive, concerted push to scale solutions that work. In essence, research tells us that providing more support over a short period of time to the poorest people could lift hundreds of millions more out of poverty. And this can be done using existing resources and delivery channels. Ending poverty is possible, but it requires that governments take the lead, working with civil society and development partners to implement proven programs that reach the most vulnerable. Without national leadership and commitment, discussions at the SDG Summit will remain just that.