Still Left Behind? Tracking children’s progress against the pledge to Leave No One Behind

The pledge to Leave No One Behind within the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda has the potential to revolutionize how the world defines and strives for progress, putting the world’s most deprived and marginalised children first. One of its key challenges is the need to collect and report disaggregated data in order to track inequality trends, strengthen accountability and support policies that accelerate progress for those furthest behind.

Still Left Behind? illustrates what that data monitoring could look like in practice. It presents approaches to monitor the progress of groups that are furthest behind both globally and nationally against five SDG indicators:

• under-five child mortality

• under-five stunting

• child marriage

• birth registration

• primary school completion

For each indicator, graphs display progress, trends, and projections for children in the world’s poorest 20% of households in comparison with the global average, revealing the rate of convergence needed to close the gap. The analysis of national progress places countries into categories according to whether they are on or off track to achieve the SDG aspiration of meeting targets for all segments of society.

This report provides a simple, systematic and powerful representation of our global collective failure to tackle inequality and ensure that all children have a fair start in life. Acknowledging the need for urgent action, it puts forward a series of recommendations for governments and international agencies to bring the pledge to Leave No One Behind to life through SDG monitoring and reporting.