Health authorities need to bridge the gap and connect with communities to successfully identify health priorities and plan for the future.
An Egyptian engineer at work on a project to upgrade the Suez Canal. Engineers will be crucial in making the sustainable development goals a reality.
Amr Dalsh/Reuters
If we want the Sustainable Development Goals to be more than just big dreams, Africa will need well trained engineers who can put their skills to good use in their own communities.
Most African countries record less than 75% of their births and deaths.
Reuters/Andreea Campeanu
In Africa, only four countries record more than 75% of their births and deaths. This creates an unequal system and impacts on how governments plan for these citizens.
The aim of the sole sustainable development goal on health is to improve health and well-being.
Reuters/Luc Gnago
Erica Penfold, South African Institute of International Affairs
In the region, the Southern African Development Community will have a critical role to ensure the targets of the sustainable development goals are met over the next 15 years.
After two years of negotiations, the UN Sustainable Development goals will be adopted today. How can society and government actually end poverty and achieve other lofty goals?
The “Africa we want” envisioned by the AU can be built - but not without universities’ help and hard work.
Shutterstock
By promoting more sustainable development we can improve the quality of life and opportunity here in Australia, while also promoting prosperity in the many developing countries in our region.
The Sustainable Development Goals include targets to end child marriages and female genital mutilation. Tahani (in pink) married when she was 6 - nearly half of all women in Yemen were married as children.
Stephanie Sinclair/VII Agency/EPA
James Whitmore, The Conversation and Emil Jeyaratnam, The Conversation
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals explained in charts.
Improving maternal mortality and ending preventable deaths in children are some of the health targets in the Sustainable Development Goals.
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade/Flickr
Health has secured its place as one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. But without clear mechanisms to report, finance or engage other sectors, could more end up as less?
Here’s a goal: no new coal mines.
Coal mine image from www.shutterstock.com
By championing economic growth, the Sustainable Development Goals are a barely disguised defence of the market fundamentalism that underpins business-as-usual. But in an age of planetary limits, sustained economic growth is not the solution to our social and environmental ills, but their cause.
Michael Otieno, a pharmacist, dispenses anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs at a hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. Among the new sustainable development goals is promoting mental health and well being and achieving universal health care.
Reuters/Thomas Mukoya
Erica Penfold, South African Institute of International Affairs
The sustainable development goals will be ratified by the United Nations next week but there are a few lessons it should learn from the failed millennium development goals.
Pope Francis and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are together seeking to mobilise world opinion to change the way we live and produce.
EPA/L'Osservatore Romano
On his first visit to the US, Pope Francis will highlight the challenges of poverty and sustainability. A related issue, he acknowledges, is population. So what does that mean for Catholic teaching?
Good governance is a foundation for sustainable development under the new goals.
Lars Plougmann/Flickr
Later this week, world leaders will gather at the United Nations in New York and adopt a set of Sustainable Development Goals to guide global development.
Australia’s prodigious coal output is one of the factors that count against it in a new appraisal of sustainability among OECD nations.
John Englart/Wikimedia Commons
A survey of OECD nations puts Australia 18th out of 34 on progress towards the world’s new sustainability goals. It scores well on quality of life, but lets itself down on - you guessed it - climate.