The UN Secretary General was quoted as saying that with less than five years to go to achieve the 2030 Agenda, the world needs to shift into overdrive. He has good reasons for making this statement.The 2025 Progress Assessment reveals that the world remains woefully off track from achieving the 169 targets set.Only 35% of the assessed targets show adequate progress – 18% are on track and 17% aremaking moderate progress.
It gets even more depressing, 48% of targets showinsufficient progress, including 31% with only marginal gains and 17% with no progress at all. And probably most alarming is that 18% of targets haveregressed below 2015 baseline levels.
The 2030 Agenda was designed as a framework for ambition, setting us up for a more sustainable future. Although there have been limited pockets of success there are some sad global realities that remain.
- 1 in 11 people still experience hunger
- Billions lack access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene
- Women still devote 2.5 times as many hours per day to unpaid care work as men
- Biodiversity loss is occurring at an alarming rate, with recent estimates showing that species extinctions are currently 10 to 100 times higher than the natural baseline
Our social challenges are becoming more complex, compounded by a changing climate. We now have aUSD 5 trillionannual financing gap for the SDGs, which has increased from USD 2.5 trillion since 2015.The hard truth is that the data suggests a dramatic step change is needed to get anywhere close to achieving those 169 targets within Agenda 2030.
How has South Africa progressed on Agenda 2030?
According to the SDG Dashboard, South Africa ranks 111 out of 167 countries and 6th insub-Saharan Africain terms of SDG progress. As a country we fair slightly better than the global trendsbased on 2023 reports:
- 31.2% of the targets have been achieved or are on track
- 41.6% of the targets have limited progress
- 27.3% of the targets are worsening
It’s a mixed bag of progress, notable gains have been seen in education, water, sanitation, energy access and education but we have a long way to go.
A significant portion of the population remains in poverty and despite a strong legal framework, violence against women remains widespread, systemic disparities related to inequalityare still prevalent and governance challenges continue to erode trust in state institutions. Solving these problems are becoming complex due to frequent and intense climate events for which limited adaptation and resilience measures have been put in place.
Blockages to progress (adapted from Tracey and Stott)
We all agree, driving sustainable change to meet the2030 Agenda is key.Professors Tracey and Stott of the University of Cambridge Centre of Social Innovation outline five systemic blockages to progress.
- Show me the money
The UN estimates that a whopping USD 5 trillion per year will be needed to achieve the SDG targets by 2030. With many countries facing record debt servicing costs, it is nearly impossible for this money to come from public coffers alone. This is certainly true for South Africa. Companies and impact investors will need to step up their efforts. Far easier said than done; 93% of impact investors said they aligned their objectives with the SDGs, 48% aimed to achieve any of the 169 specific targets, and only 11% actually engaged with communities, customers, workers, and other stakeholders to understand the impact they were having or not having. It is not simply about accessing funds but rather engaging in efforts to understand, co-design and co-create to ensure sustainable impact.
- Marginalisation of the State
Most discourse on innovation and social development in theory and practice focus on the social and/or private sectors, with the state often perceived as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. A great global example of this relates to climate change. Initially states were lauded for the Paris Agreement as an internationally coordinated strategy to tackle climate changeandprovidethe regulatory framework to do so. Research now shows that the emphasis is increasingly shifting towards the“innovative capacity” of firms in the private sector to enable change. According to an April 2025Ipsos poll 50% of South Africans held negative views on the Government of National Unity’s ability to work together.
This level of marginalisation has significant unintended consequences from philanthropic and private sectors that push individual strategies rather than doing what is in the best interest of the country. It is unlikely that the 2030 Agenda can be achieved if governments do not lead and if stakeholders do not acknowledge their legitimacy.
- Greenwashing
It’s no secret that the SDGs have made significant room for private sector involvement, largely because of the quantum required to achieve them. But while there is much rhetoric, and some impressive individual case studies, corporate engagement with the SDGs has so far not been as a high impact as anticipated. In fact, researchers looked at the 2000 largest stock listed companies in the world and measured their engagement with the SDGs. They found that while most of these companies are talking about SDGs, they do not form part of the core strategy and firms are not making specific commitments to meet them. This does bring into question whether voluntary codes can drive meaningful impact.
- The pressure to scale
Scale and replicability are often two words that are most frequently used in the development sector. Social investors, governments, and foundations are looking for projects that have succeeded in one place and asking organisations to replicate them in another place. The reality is that the challenges faced tend to be local if not hyperlocal in nature. The diversity of South Africa’s communities and ecosystems means that the simple replication of solutions in one province is unlikely to achieve the desired outcomes in another. When it comes to addressing deep-rooted challenges associated with the SDGs, many of the problems – such as inequality – are underpinned by complex sets of social, cultural, and political factors, unless actors are locally embedded in the system and seek to embrace local and indigenous knowledge solutions as part of the interventions it is unlikely that significant impact can be achieved.
- Top-down intervention
A critical concern in the South African context is that well-intentioned philanthropic or private actors may implement solutions based on what they think a community needs. The risk is that these interventions are “done to” communities, rather than done with or by them, and often fail to take root or have unintended negative consequences in the longer-term because they are inconsistent with local cultural traditions and ways of organising. Top-down interventions can also be problematic from a public sector perspective and across South Africa there is no shortage of government projects that are now considered “white elephants”. As stated earlier, solutions should be co-designed and co-created with communities to achieve greater impact.
A social extrapreneurship approach to accelerate action
The problems South Africa is attempting to solve through implementing the SDGs and its own National Development Plan are significantly complexin nature. There are no quick fixes but one approach that could help frame a path to action is social extrapreneurship – the process of interorganisational action that facilitates alternative combinations of ideas, people, places and resources to address social challenges. The approach to change is done through platforms that support collective effort within and between new and established organisations.
The data suggests that we have gone past the point of making meaningful progress as individual actors. We need collective action across sectoral boundaries, and this is what social extrapreneurship offers us as a country. If we can create an enabling environment for social innovators to thrive and use the blockages identified as guard rails of how to co-create and design future interventions, South Africa could achieve meaningful socio-economic impact.
This will not be easy and will require unconventional partnerships, but it can be done. Earlier this year BCG worked together with mining activists and mining companies to develop a nature positive blueprint for the Magaliesberg Biosphere. These stakeholders would have traditionally spent resources fighting each other but by demonstrating a willingness to become social extrapreneurs they laid for the foundation to preserve the environment and stimulate the local economy in a more sustainable manner.
Adopting a social innovation lens to our existing challenges allows us to see new possibilities. Consider the just energy transition which has been talked about a lot in the country… access to clean energy, green jobs are core components of it but a just transition in the context of South Africa should also consider rebalancing the power and allowing communities to be more than passive recipients of CSR programmes. The Awel and Egni Cooperatives in Walesfor examplehave demonstrated that community owned and operated wind farms thatact as solar installers are entirely possible. Sceptics might point out specific governance conditions are needed to make these cooperatives a success. However, if the government facilitates an enabling environment and the private sector is incentivised accordingly then socially innovative approaches will emerge and the scale of the interventions may surprise us.
We need a step change because business as usual is not going to get us anywhere near Agenda 2030 and a fresh set of ideas might challenge what we think is possible. Social innovation might be the stimulus to create that.
