Citizens Have a New Tool to Hold Governments Accountable for the Global Goals

The United Nations recently announced its new Global Goals. Building on the Millennium Development Goals, this new set of ambitions includes ending extreme poverty and delivering gender equality by 2030. They lay down the gauntlet to all of us -- policy-makers, civil society and the business community alike -- to find bold, innovative solutions to the world's most pressing issues. Citizens need a way to hold their leaders accountable for the commitments they have made. It's for that reason that we have partnered with Global Citizen and Project Everyone to launch the 'People's Report Card' to track whether our leaders are living up to the promise of the Global Goals. We have distilled down the 17 Global Goals and 169 targets into a simple measure on a scale from F to A, where F is humanity at its worst and A is humanity at its best. The world needs an 'A' grade to meet the Global Goals in 2030. The first People's Report Card shows that today we're languishing at C-. We have fifteen years to find the political will, the resources, and the partnerships that can deliver this giant leap forward in the wellbeing of humanity. The People's Report Card uses data from the Social Progress Index, an annual measure of national progress which assesses how countries are doing in three different ways: how safe citizens are, how healthy they, are and how free they are. It provides an aggregate picture of how each country and the world are doing on these key issues that matter in all of our day-to-day lives that maps closely to the Global Goals. Each year between now and 2030 we will publish a People's Report Card for both the world and for every country. The People's Report Cards will be a simple and direct benchmark of how humanity is progressing on our journey towards the Global Goals over the next 15 years. They will empower all of us to ask the hard questions and to hold our leaders to account if policy does not translate into progress. This initiative is the culmination of years of work, whose purpose is to distil global social progress into a comprehensible figure. We applaud the UN's ambitions and celebrate the historic opportunity of the Global Goals. We have the 'what?, now the debate must move on to the 'how?'. The People's Report Card is about making sure that we, the citizens of the world, are heard in that debate.