A voice for youth action on the Sustainable Development Goals

For the second year running, youth rank clean water and sanitation as top of their SDG priorities. A staggering 77% of youth respondents believe it is a “very important” goal – only 3% do not identify it among their priorities. Despite its importance, only 39% of the initial enthusiasts have or plan to take action to support this goal. Clean Water & Sanitation is a global priority that will severely impact lives and livelihoods in the future. Though significant steps have been made towards addressing this goal, specifically in water use efficiency – which according to the United Nations improved by 9% last year, 1.8 billion people continue to live in households without a source of water on the premises². Broken down by geography, in 2022, 73% of the global population had access to safely managed drinking water services, with regional coverage ranging from 94% in Europe and Northern America to 31% in sub-Saharan Africa³. Achieving universal coverage by 2030 will require a substantial increase in current global efforts: sixfold for drinking water, fivefold for sanitation, and threefold for hygiene.

Enabling the inclusiveness and quality of education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities ranked second on this year’s list of priorities in our survey, as 74% consider it “very important”. Even before the pandemic, progress towards quality education was already slower than required, but COVID-19 had a devastating impact on accessibility and quality of education. For years, and since 2010, global participation rates in organized learning (one year before the official primary entry age) have remained steady at 70%, with significant disparities across and within territories and regions. Learning losses as a result of the pandemic are estimated at four out of five of the 104 countries studied by UN analyses⁴. In 2021, despite the provision of free and compulsory pre-primary education in these regions, the lowest pre-primary participation rates were observed in Sub-Saharan Africa (47%), and Northern Africa and Western Asia (46%). In contrast, Europe and North America have maintained a high early childhood education (ECE) participation rate of 91% in 2022, which has remained unchanged since 2010. Similarly, Latin America and the Caribbean (90% in 2022) and Oceania (79% in 2022) have not shown any changes in ECE participation since 2016⁵.

The global healthcare industry has been slowly evolving from one focused on caring for the sick to one that fully embraces wellness, mostly due to the needs and growing expectations of younger generations. Generation Z, representing the majority of responders in this current study, is about to take this transformation to the next level – 73% of them place Good Health and Well-being as their third most important sustainability goal, while half of them are already taking action to see the goal realised. Born between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z represents about 25% of the global population, but to date, they account for only 3.3% of total healthcare/wellness expenditure. In part, this is because they are not getting the kind of healthcare they want, need, and would seek out if offered.

That being said, significant strides have been made in the provision of basic healthcare services. For example, 166 of 200 countries have achieved or will soon achieve their target for under-5 mortality. Due to effective HIV treatment, there has been a 52% reduction in global AIDS mortality since 2010, and at least one neglected tropical disease has been eliminated in 47 countries. Despite this, a myriad of factors, including but not limited to Covid-19, as well as ongoing economic crises and challenges, have hampered progress on aspects of expanding universal health coverage, reducing maternal mortality, and immunisation. Every day, around 800 women around the world die during pregnancy or childbirth, immunisation has seen its biggest decline in three decades, and deaths from tuberculosis and malaria have increased compared to pre-pandemic levels⁶.

Aggravated by natural disasters, geo-political conflict, and socio-economic challenges, “Zero Hunger” continues, for the second year running, to be one of the top priorities for our youth respondents. The latest “State of Food Security and Nutrition” report paints a concerning picture of the state of world hunger: 735 million people are still facing hunger every day; predictions show that this number will not fall below 600 million until 2030⁷. In absolute terms, this indicates only a slight increase over 2015, the year of the 2030 Agenda adoption. Increasingly, and in light of global events and conflicts, the goal of Zero Hunger is now a distant, even diminishing, prospect, making the need for guidance on ‘transformative and accelerated action’ urgently needed.

Considering that the bulk of the survey sample is based in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, it is unsurprising that Peace, Justice, & Strong Institutions ranked 5th of the 17 SDGs among our youth respondents. Similar to last year’s survey, approximately 70% of youth respondents stated that this goal is “very important” to them. Perhaps due to the nature of the Goal and the fact that it directly relates to state actions and institutions, this goal had the highest action gap. Only 35% of the young males and females interviewed are already taking concrete actions to support this goal.

Despite its breadth in scope, the achievement of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 16th Goal is a crucial precondition for sustainable development, affecting all aspects of life and world citizens of all ages. 108.4 million people were forcibly displaced globally at the end of 2022, up 19 million from the previous year and 2.5 times the figure from ten years earlier. Sadly, for the first time since the adoption of Agenda 2030, the year 2022 witnessed an increase of more than 50% in conflict-related civilian deaths⁸. In 2022, at least 16,988 civilians were killed, with 1 in 5 victims being women. Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe accounted for 90% of the deaths. Given ongoing conflict around the world, it is likely that the number will be considerably higher for 2023 and 2024.

Extreme poverty, defined by the United Nations as living on less than $2.15 per person per day at 2017 purchasing power parity, is a multidimensional condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, as well as the lack of access to education, information, living standards, and social inclusion⁹. In March 2023, the global poverty headcount ratio of people living at the $2.15 per day threshold stood at 8.5%, resulting in an increase in the number of poor people from 648 million previously to 659 million worldwide. This revision reflects an additional 11 million people living in extreme poverty—5 million more people from South Asia and 4 million more from the Middle East and North Africa¹⁰. At the current rate, in 2030 an estimated 575 million people, or 7% of the world’s population, could still be living in severe poverty, with a large concentration in sub-Saharan Africa. The fact that hunger has returned to levels last seen in 2005 is a serious setback in achieving the number 1 goal of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The continued rise in food prices in a greater number of countries compared to 2015-2019 is equally worrying—food security and poverty still present a serious worldwide threat.

The pivotal role of this specific goal in the overall SDGs is also visible in the results of our 2024 Global Youth Outlook survey. 65% of respondents consider No Poverty as “very important,” ranking it 6th in order of importance, with an even distribution across genders and age groups. However, the fact that only 33% of young people are already taking action to support this goal is rather concerning, making it one of the goals with the highest action gap (32 points).

Amid a global energy crisis driven by conflict, depleted natural resources, and an overwhelming reliance on electronic devices, 65% of this year’s respondents consider Affordable and Clean Energy to be a top priority. Strikingly, this is also one of the top goals for which young people feel least empowered – 24% of those interviewed said “I would like to support the goals but cannot act on it,” which could be an important opportunity for governments to engage youth.

If current trends in energy generation and consumption continue, renewable energy sources will make up only 42% of the global energy supply in 2028; with nearly 2 billion people still relying on polluting fuels and 660 million people at the risk of losing access to electricity.

The past decade has been the warmest since global records began in 1850, with 2023 ranking as the warmest year on record, bearing with it massive wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, floods, and other climate disasters across continents. Highly vulnerable regions (including countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East), home to roughly 3.3–3.6 billion people, saw 15 times higher rates of human mortality from floods, droughts, and storms between 2010 and 2020.

In comparison to last year’s survey results, there is a considerable change in position and proportion of youth that ranked this goal as “very important”. In our 2024 Global Youth Outlook survey, 56% of those interviewed deemed Climate Action as “very important”, ranking this goal 9th among the top 10 most important SDGs, while in 2023, Climate Action emerged as the second most important SDG, with 72% of last year’s respondents ranking it as “very important”. This shift in priorities could also be explained by the timing during which the survey was run, which coincided with conflict and war across Europe and the Middle East giving priority to more social SDGs.

According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, Gen Z and Millennials (the core groups of our survey) are more engaged in matters of climate change than older adults and express more anxiety about the future, especially when communicating online. They talk more about the need for action on climate change, engage with more climate change content online, and are more involved with the issue through activities such as volunteering and attending rallies and protests. Similarly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, compared to older adults, Gen Z and Millennials were also more engaged in climate change activism, with 32% and 28% respectively participating in at least one of four actions (donating, contacting elected officials, volunteering, or attending rallies) in 2021, compared to 21% of Gen X and Baby Boomers¹¹.

Women and girls of all ages represent half of the world’s population; however, gender disparity is still pervasive, impeding social progress. In the global job market, on average, women still earn 23% less than males despite putting in three times as many hours performing unpaid caregiving and household duties. Achieving gender equality requires cross-sectional reforms to break systemic barriers in all areas of life – legal, social, and economic.

6 years before the 2030 milestone, only 15.4% of the UN Goal 5 indicators are “on track,” 61.5% are at a moderate distance, and 23.1% are far or very far off track from targets. If current trends continue, it will take an estimated 300 years to eradicate child marriage, 286 years to eliminate discriminatory laws and close legal protection gaps, 140 years to equalize the representation of women in leadership and power positions in the workplace, and 47 years to attain equal representation in national parliaments.

In the 2024 edition of our survey, Gender equality ranked 12th place in order of importance, with a blended rate (both female and male) of 53% of respondents considering it as “very important,” marking a considerable change from last year’s ranking in which its prioritisation as “very important” by 64% of the respondents ranked it 4th in order of importance. As expected, girls/women interviewed in our survey attribute considerably more importance to the gender equality goal than boys/men – 62% of female respondents deemed gender equality as “very important.” Similarly, 41% of the girls and women surveyed are already taking action to support this goal, compared to only 34% of their male counterparts¹².