The pandemic and economic collapse dealt a severe blow to the progress that was being made toward eradicating extreme poverty, improving health and education, and reducing hunger and inequity. Those are the Sustainable Development Goals, aka the Global Goals, the World’s ‘to-do list’ for a better, fairer world by 2030.

“A lot of of the people who were in precarious situations ended up falling deeper into poverty,” explained one of the leading experts on the goals, Vishal Gujadhur, an economist at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  “And that’s something that’s really disappointing and that’s really a setback to the SDGs.”

But here is the good news. Or at least what co host Edie Lush calls “the better news.”

“Due to really strong action from individuals from governments, from communities we’ve averted the worst-case scenario,” Gujadhur reports, based on the Gates foundations latest Goalkeepers report on the SDGs.

The “apocalyptic” numbers being reported at this time last year are already beginning to turn around, Gujadhur said. The recovery is uneven. The poor have suffered the worst and are recovering more slowly, both between countries and within countries.

The world needs to redouble efforts to get back on track toward the global goals. Every effort counts and local, small-scale efforts can add up to big change. We visit a hotel in Rwanda, empty during lockdowns, that stepped up by using its kitchen and staff to deliver meals to hungry kids at the local primary school.  “They were happy,” one of the hotel trainees, Jesca Rusaro, said of the school children. “And that makes me happy, too.”