The clock is ticking for U.N. goals to end poverty — and it doesn't look promising

A women holds a child in the alley of a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Bangladesh is one of the world's poorest countries; nearly 40% of the population survive on less than a dollar a day. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

It was an ambitious promise: Back in 2015 the world's leaders gathered at the United Nations to commit to a set of targets that – taken together – would lift the world's most destitute, along with many of the rest of us, into a better life by the year 2030.

But almost immediately it became clear that the world was not moving fast enough to accomplish most of these 17 "sustainable development goals," or SDGs. Now, at the half-way point, with leaders once again gathered at the United Nations for its annual General Assembly meetings, multiple assessments of the SDGS – including scorecard reports by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations – find that for many of the SDGs progress has all but halted.