With little more than five years left to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, world leaders will gather at the Summit of the Future in New York to agree on a landmark Pact for the Future aimed at reviving flagging progress on these critical goals.
Despite laudable efforts since the SDGs were adopted by the United Nations in 2015, the world is woefully behind its targets. Even the U.N. has said that progress is so far disappointing. We must accept that our current approaches are simply not working.
The pact, therefore, must not only inspire the world to action, it must set out bold new ideas that have the potential to rapidly accelerate progress, and it mustn’t leave anyone behind.
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About the author
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf served as president of Liberia from 2006 to 2018. She was the first woman to be democratically elected as head of state in Africa, and in 2011 became a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She is the founder of the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development.
