The world is on course to miss every one of the 52 health-related Sustainable Development Goal targets by 2030, the World Health Organization has warned, as ministers from its 194 member states gather in Geneva for an assembly tasked with reversing that trajectory.

With malaria cases rising, maternal deaths still occurring at nearly three times the targeted rate and childhood vaccination coverage plateauing or falling in some regions, progress on global health goals has slowed, stalled or reversed across virtually every measure since 2015, according to the 2026 edition of the WHO’s World Health Statistics report.

“Progress is too slow, too uneven, and increasingly fragile,” Yukiko Nakatani, WHO assistant director-general for health systems, access and data, told a press briefing on Wednesday. “The report is an urgent reminder for member states and all health partners together: we must refocus efforts, safeguard hard-won gains and renew progress.”

WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said progress toward the health goals was “insufficient, uneven across regions and populations, and increasingly vulnerable to systemic shocks”, with a disproportionate burden falling on low- and middle-income countries, especially those in fragile and conflict-affected settings.

“Progress has stalled on universal health coverage, maternal and child health and reduction in premature mortality due to noncommunicable diseases — which remain the leading causes of mortality globally,” Tedros said.

“These data tell a story of both progress and persistent inequality,” the WHO chief added, “with many people – especially women, children and those in underserved communities – still denied the basic conditions for a healthy life.”

Once achievable health targets out of reach

The SDG health targets are part of a wider agenda adopted by all UN member states in 2015, setting goals on poverty, hunger, education, gender equality, climate and health by 2030.

The third goal — “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages” — sets the dozens of indicators tracked by the annual WHO report, ranging from maternal mortality and HIV incidence to tobacco use and air pollution deaths.

These were once seen as among the most achievable of the SDGs, given significant progress made under the agenda’s predecessor, the Millennium Development Goals. That hope has not materialised — and the wider SDG agenda is faring no better, with the latest UN figures finding only about a sixth of all targets on course for the 2030 deadline.

“Of the 52 health-related SDG indicators reviewed in this report, more than half have numeric SDG or other global targets,” WHO found. “And none is on track to meet the target at the global level.”

Malaria reversing, TB barely moving

The reversal of progress in eradicating malaria is perhaps the starkest failure on the SDG health agenda. While the world set a target to reduce cases by 90% by 2030, global incidence has instead risen by 8.5%.

The African Region carries nearly the entire global burden, recording an estimated 282 million cases in 2024. Only the South-East Asia Region is on track to meet the 2025 milestone of a 75% reduction.

Tuberculosis is another major failure: of the 80% reduction target set in the WHO End TB Strategy, just 12% has been achieved since 2015.

The European Region cut its TB rate by 39% over the period, while the Region of the Americas went backwards, recording a 13% increase. The African Region, despite still bearing the highest burden, achieved a 28% reduction, more than double the global average.

The HIV picture is brighter, with new infections falling 40% since 2010 to 1.3 million worldwide in 2024. The African Region has cut new infections by 70% — a major achievement — but still accounts for 65% of the 40.8 million people living with HIV worldwide.

Yet HIV incidence cuts remain well short of the 90% SDG target. Hope circulated before 2015 that ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030 was within reach, has faded away.

Maternal and child deaths: progress stalling

The global maternal mortality ratio has fallen 40% since 2000, but at 197 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2023 it remains nearly three times the 2030 target of fewer than 70 deaths per 100,000 live births.

The annual rate of reduction has slowed to 1.6% since 2015. The world needs that figure to climb to nearly 15% to hit the SDG, a pace more than nine times faster than the world has managed over the past quarter century. Doing so would mean preventing nearly 700,000 maternal deaths by 2030.

Each day, 712 women still die from maternal causes — one every two minutes.

A staggering 80% of those deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where girls face a one-in-40 chance of dying of pregnancy-related complications by age 15. Central and Southern Asia come a distant second, accounting for 17% of the global death toll.

Globally, nearly 95% of all maternal deaths occur in low- and lower middle-income countries. Meanwhile, 73 countries, mostly in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, recorded fewer than 20 maternal deaths in 2020.

Vaccination coverage flatlines

Routine childhood immunisation has largely flatlined, with global coverage stuck below the levels needed to prevent the outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases now resurging in several regions.

Coverage with the third dose of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine has plateaued at around 85%, while second-dose measles vaccination sits at 76% — far below the roughly 95% the WHO says is needed to prevent outbreaks.

The Region of the Americas, once a global leader on routine immunisation, now reports lower coverage for three of four core vaccines than in 2015. The WHO has linked persistent immunity gaps to the rising measles transmission reported across several regions over the past year, including major outbreaks in the United States, Europe and parts of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Coverage of the human papillomavirus vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer, has grown faster than any other core vaccine since 2021 — but from a very low base, reaching just 28% of the target group of 9-14-year-old girls globally in 2024.

A pandemic toll three times larger than officially recorded

A key finding buried deep in the report is a new estimate for excess deaths related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The WHO now estimates 22.1 million deaths above expectation occurred between 2020 and 2023, roughly three times the 7 million COVID-19 deaths officially reported worldwide.

Excess mortality peaked at 10.4 million in 2021, with men experiencing age-standardised excess death rates around 50% higher than women, and people aged 85 and over recording rates ten times those of younger adults, the report found.

The ratio of excess deaths to officially reported COVID-19 deaths rose from roughly 1:1 in 2020 to about 9:1 by 2023, which the WHO attributes increasingly to underreporting as many countries wound down testing and attempted to move past the crisis.

The pandemic erased nearly a decade of gains in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, the WHO chief said, with only female life expectancy returning to pre-pandemic levels globally by 2023.

“The COVID-19 pandemic inflicted a setback of historic proportions,” Tedros said. “Recovery since 2022 has been uneven, with persistent disparities according to region, age and sex.”

Where there has been progress

Some indicators are moving in the right direction. Tobacco use has fallen 27% since 2010 — narrowly missing the 30% reduction target — and alcohol consumption is down 13%.

Between 2015 and 2024, 961 million more people gained access to safely managed drinking water, 1.2 billion to safe sanitation, 1.6 billion to basic hygiene services, and 1.4 billion to clean cooking fuels. The number of people requiring interventions for neglected tropical diseases has fallen 36% since 2010.

“These trends reflect too many deaths that could have been avoided,” Nakatani said. “With rising environmental risks, health emergencies, and a worsening health financing crisis, we must act urgently — strengthening primary health care, investing in prevention, and securing sustainable financing to build resilient health systems and get back on track.”

A ‘global health financing emergency’

The WHO warned that the limited gains were now under serious threat from a “global health financing emergency”, as billions of dollars cut by the United States and other wealthy donors, much of it destined to fund progress towards the SDGs, are now gone.

“Official development assistance for health was estimated to be 30-40% less in 2025 than in 2023,” Tedros said. “Many countries face long-standing structural constraints including high debt burdens and insufficient domestic public financing. Sudden aid reductions risk significant disruption of essential health services, reduced access to life-saving essential medicines and vaccines.”

A WHO rapid assessment of 108 low- and lower-middle-income countries earlier this year found that 63% reported job losses, salary suspensions or reductions among health and care workers as a result of the aid cuts. Nearly 70% anticipated future recruitment problems in the health sector.

Alain Labrique, director of WHO’s Department of Data, Digital Health, Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, noted that because the report’s data run only through 2024, the full effect of recent cuts to US foreign aid and other donor retrenchment is not yet visible.

“Should these trends continue, and we don’t see reinvigorated investment in global health, this will have an effect on global health indicators,” he said. “It may continue to cause a reversal in the patterns that we worked so hard to gain.”

Missing data paints a darker picture 

Compounding the picture is the fact that the WHO’s own data is incomplete — and likely understates the scale of the problem.

Of an estimated 61 million deaths globally in 2023, only around 21 million were reported to the agency with cause-of-death information. Just 12 million had meaningful coding under the International Classification of Diseases, the global standard used to record what people die from and the foundation of comparable mortality statistics worldwide.

Only 18% of countries reported mortality data within a year. Nearly a third have never submitted cause-of-death data at all.

The shortfalls are concentrated in low- and lower-middle-income countries, where civil registration systems are weakest and where the disease burden is heaviest. Funding cuts have also disrupted disease surveillance, Nakatani said.

“Erosion of data, planning, and surveillance systems undermines reliable measurement, which is essential for progress,” Tedros said. “Too few deaths are recorded with timely, accurate, and meaningful cause-of-death information, limiting the accuracy and relevance of mortality statistics for policy and planning.”

“Data gaps severely limit the ability to monitor real-time health trends, compare outcomes across countries, and design effective public health responses,” Labrique said.

Image Credits: John Cameron, Priscila Oliveira.