By JoAnne Wadsworth, Communications Consultant, G20 Interfaith Forum
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This is the fourth and final post in a series covering IF20’s draft discussion papers for 2026. The first three responded directly to the priorities of the U.S. G20 presidency. This one does not. “The SDG Framework: Faith Engagement and Challenges” was written by Katherine Marshall, Vice President of the G20 Interfaith Forum Association, Executive Director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, and senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. It was produced by IF20 together with WFDD and the Berkley Center, and grew out of a workshop held at Georgetown in May on the broader global agenda. The full paper is available for those who want the detail behind this summary.
There is a reason this paper sits outside the three-priority frame. The 2026 G20 process has been deliberately narrowed to priority economic issues, and the engagement groups are not formally part of it. The Sustainable Development Goals are the agenda that continues regardless: endorsed unanimously by 193 UN member states in 2015, carrying a 2030 deadline that is now four years away.
The paper does not soften what has happened in the meantime. More than 80% of the 169 SDG targets are reported to be off track. A tenth of the global population still lives in poverty. More than two billion people are moderately or severely food insecure. Progress has slowed across health indicators. The causes are not mysterious (the pandemic, intensified interstate conflict, accelerating climate change, and declining development and aid spending), but the result is a genuinely uncertain future for the international development architecture itself.
The question the paper asks is the one that follows: how can faith actors help close those gaps, and what should a post-2030 agenda look like?
What the Paper Covers
It concentrates on the first four goals (no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education) on the grounds that these address the most urgent needs and form the basis for achieving the rest. The picture in each is sobering. Only one in five countries is expected to have halved its national poverty rate by 2030, and low-income countries spend just 2% of GDP on social protection, reaching under a tenth of their populations. Between 638 and 720 million people experienced hunger in 2024. COVID-19 cut life expectancy by nearly two years, and tuberculosis is once again the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent. More than 270 million school-age children and young people were out of school in 2023, and among those in school, only 58% of primary students reach minimum proficiency in reading.
Against that, the paper maps what faith communities are already doing, and the map is dense. Akhuwat in Pakistan provides interest-free loans. Akshaya Patra serves hot lunches to more than two million children across 23,000 Indian primary schools. The list runs on through the Aga Khan Health Services, Sant’Egidio’s DREAM project, Tzu Chi, Islamic Relief Worldwide, Lutheran World Relief, Sarvodaya Shramadana in Sri Lanka, Fe y Alegría, and Catholic sisters running schools in the remotest places. The Catholic Church alone operates over 230,000 schools and more than 1,300 universities, and the total number of religiously affiliated educational institutions worldwide likely runs into the hundreds of thousands.
Here the paper identifies a gap that matters more than it sounds: Religious roles are rarely accounted for explicitly in measurements of SDG progress at global or national levels. Work at this scale is happening largely off the ledger, which means the official picture of where the world stands is incomplete, and the contributions that could be built upon are the hardest ones to see.
The paper then sets out why faith actors are worth counting. Local religious leaders enjoy trust that outside organizations can take decades to earn, and that trust shapes attitudes on vaccination, girls’ education, and climate. Religious institutions can bridge the persistent gap between the language of the goals and how flourishing is actually understood in local contexts. And at a moment when development budgets have been slashed and the field’s future is uncertain, faith communities bring a long-term commitment to their own places that does not depend on a funding cycle.
What the Paper Proposes for Beyond 2030
Rather than a conventional recommendations list, the paper offers five proposals for the next development agenda, intended to catalyze discussion at the G20 Interfaith Forums in the U.S., the U.K., and beyond:
- Consolidate, deepen, and integrate the goals. The breadth of the 17-goal framework and its checklist structure have encouraged fragmented thinking. A post-2030 framework should concentrate on the most pressing issues and make their interconnections explicit, with faith leaders part of the reframing.
- Prioritize localization. Implementation has remained largely top-down and technocratic despite a decade of commitments to the contrary. Local communities need a role in setting targets, implementing projects, and evaluating progress, and religious institutions are already embedded where state mechanisms are weak or absent.
- Renew the emphasis on peace and social cohesion. Faith communities already mediate local conflicts and join formal peace talks. The paper is candid that faith is also used to justify conflict, and asks religious actors to use their moral authority to build bridges rather than sow division.
- Put climate, environment, and biodiversity at the center. Environmental degradation now touches every area of development, and the connections to poverty, hunger, health, and livelihoods should be drawn explicitly rather than treated as a separate track.
- Elevate the ethical use of technology. AI-assisted medical screening and teaching tools could scale effective interventions, but only with robust ethical guidelines, a point where religious actors have a particular contribution to make.
That closes out IF20’s discussion papers for 2026. Three of them meet the G20 where it currently is. This one asks what happens when the deadline arrives and the targets have not been met, and argues that the answer depends partly on whether the world starts counting the contributions it has not been counting. All four remain drafts, open for comment ahead of the Salt Lake City gathering in October.
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JoAnne Wadsworth is a Communications Consultant for the G20 Interfaith Forum Association and Editor of the Viewpoints blog, IF20’s platform for commentary at the intersection of faith and global policy. She has covered the work of the Forum across multiple G20 cycles, producing summaries, articles, and editorial content that bring the voices of interfaith leaders and scholars to a broader audience. Her writing engages with topics spanning environmental governance, religious freedom, anti-racism, poverty and inequality, and the role of faith in multilateral policy processes. “The SDG Framework: Faith Engagement and Challenges” was written by Katherine Marshall, who has worked on international development for more than four decades, including thirty-five years at the World Bank, with a sustained focus on the countries and communities with the least.