We can still repurpose 2030.
Let the Global Goals not be a total waste.

 

By Anthony Kalulu  @KaluluAnthony  |  September 1, 2026.

—-

 

On the very first day of 2020, I wrote a story in The Guardian in which I said “…in all this, what breaks my heart is that the current stalling on progress of the Global Goals means we might end up in the same place in 2030, with nothing new, unless something changes now.”

And now, with only 4 years left, I fear that prediction is exactly what is set to happen.

My own story, or the circumstances where I live, are only a tiny drop in the ocean of communities facing extreme poverty across the global south — whose lives would change if humanity had seen these goals through. I still believe there is some progress we can make to achieve these goals, especially if the things laid out by the Global Goals, such as “bringing together people and ideas”, “fostering cross-sector collaborations”, and “leaving no one behind”, were made a reality.

And since extreme poverty has particularly remained a problem for Black people globally, I also think the global Black community has a role to play, both in meeting the Global Goals, and in ending extreme poverty for good.

Remember, before COVID, the World Bank had projected (in 2018) that, by 2030, “nearly 9 in 10 (or 90%) of the extreme poor globally will live in Sub Saharan Africa”, a region that constitutes 48 out of Africa’s 54 countries. When you factor in the number of Black people living in poverty in the other 6 African countries outside of Sub Saharan Africa, plus Black people in South America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, you realize that, by 2030, nearly all people living in extreme poverty globally were on course to be Black, by pre-covid estimates.

If poverty is set to become an overwhelmingly Black reality, there is no way this is going to change if the global Black community only seeks action from humanity, while we ourselves fail to come together. On the other hand, if humanity is already spending billions every year with the explicit goal of ending extreme poverty, there is no point in doing so if these billions only remain in the hands of a few qualified people who rarely reach the extreme poor, and whose work — even in the few communities they reach — often ends as soon as they depart.

In my view, we can end extreme poverty, and even meet the Global Goals, if (a) the things that were spelled out by the Global Goals, such as “fostering cross-sector partnerships”, actually meant fostering partnerships with the people living in extreme poverty themselves, not simply partnerships among the world’s anti-poverty elites, and (b) those at the very bottom of the pyramid were put directly in charge of ending poverty.

Here in my district of Kamuli, in eastern Uganda, for instance, there are many communities that haven’t seen a single global antipoverty agency, not just since 2015, but since the days of the MDGs in the 2000s. The extreme poor, by contrast, permanently live in these communities, and can therefore end poverty on a sustained basis, if only they were placed at the helm.

 

As a person, the Global Goals had given me hope for a reason:

If you visited Bukolobe ward, in Kamuli town, in eastern Uganda, and looked for a man called Sheikh Hakim Muganza, who was my landlord in 2015 — the year the UN Global Goals were launched, you will realize why I am one of the few people still talking about the Global Goals, at a time when almost all talk about these goals has stalled.

The week the Global Goals were launched, I was spending all my time inside a rented room, my door always locked, with no job, and nothing to eat — and it had been like this for months. My landlord, Mr. Muganza, had a domestic helper named Budhala, and very often, I could overhear them saying, “but we could be here when this man is starving.” Minutes later, Budhala would come knocking on my door, often bringing me a cob of maize.

Three years earlier in 2012, I had become a farmer, but my farming was still far from making me self-sustaining. First, I had no land, and was using rented land 11 km away from Kamuli where I stayed (I couldn’t find land to rent near town). The land was also waterlogged, because I wanted to begin with quick-maturing vegetables. This means, I had to get people to help with draining the water; create raised paddocks; pay the land owner; commute from Kamuli; pay rent where I was staying etc. Surviving became hard.

During that same period, I also learnt something I didn’t know before: local farmers struggle a lot to find markets for their produce. So, a year before the Global Goals came, I had founded (in 2014)  the Uganda Community Farm (UCF), a nonprofit, with the goal of working together with other farmers to grow specific crops so we can pool our produce and find a big buyer.

Top: Anthony (right), with other farmers in a sorghum field in Kawaga, Kamuli, 2022.
Bottom: delivering sorghum to Uganda Breweries and buying sorghum seed, 2024.

So, the Global Goals came at a time when I was practically still living in actual hunger, but when I was actively trying to map a way out of this — although that particular September of 2015, when these goals were being launched, even the UCF itself had not yet initiated any of our current activities, and we had not yet secured the land where the UCF is today.

Somehow, I felt the Global Goals had come at the right time, and — with the aid of a basic Nokia phone that had a web browser — I was keenly following all world news related to these goals. Today, most people who have ever mentioned the Global Goals in their work, have heard from me seeking some form of collaboration.

Top: With visitors from The Life You Can Save at a household
in Namisita, Kamuli. Below: in a sorghum field, 2023.

 

Going silent on the Global Goals means more than a wasted 2030.

For those of us trying to build a path out of chronic poverty, giving up on the Global Goals isn’t simply about ending up in the same place in 2030 with nothing new. It is about slipping back into the same circumstances we are emerging from — because nothing was done to lock in the little progress we have made.

Although my own life as a farmer has been difficult, it still represents decades of fighting for a better life. And again, my story is only a tiny part of what communities across the global south are going through.

Before I turned to farming, I was a primary school teacher at a local school near Kamuli town, and during my 7 years there (2004 – 2011), one thing I kept asking myself was: “is it true that I’m going to die without having lived for a single day when I didn’t worry about food — even after becoming employed?” Because, it had been the case since childhood.

I believe, if our school had guaranteed food, I wouldn’t have quit teaching to this day. Just food. Not money to build a house, or anything like that, but food. First, my starting salary of ugx 113,000 (about $30 today) couldn’t really buy me anything, especially since I was renting in town, and was paying for everything. But food was the real worry.

In the last staff meeting that I attended in 2011 before I quit, our headteacher said, “teachers, from now onward, all porridge [the only food we had at school] is going to be for Primary 1 and Primary 2 children only. This porridge came from maize that the school used to ask children to bring, 3kgs per child. But because the government discouraged it, most children especially in middle and upper primary never did. Only those in lower primary, P1 and P2 (aged 6-8), used to be responsive.

Back home, with nothing to eat, I asked myself: now, I have been surviving at the mercy of 6-8 year-olds, who also come from dire poverty, but even this has ended. I felt I couldn’t carry on. At that point, I had also deliberately started going to school late (around 10am), because going early meant I was going to meet students on the way who laughed at my worn out shoes and clothing (it happened several times). Even at school they could laugh, and assign nicknames, but at least there I was in control. The scariest place to meet students had become the area between home & school.

And the reason I used to ask myself if life was going to be this way until I die, is because teaching itself was the biggest opportunity that came my way only by chance after the government introduced free teacher training in 2001, when I had dropped out of school two years earlier in 1998. During my 4 years of secondary school (1995 – 1998), I rarely ate any food, and getting tuition was very hard.

The school I attended (St John Bosco Kamuli) was 40km from home; I was a day scholar (my mom couldn’t afford tuition for the boarding section), and I had no relative I could stay with in Kamuli town. I depended only on the lunch I ate at school, and nothing else back home.

In my worst year, 1997, whenever I stood up after being seated for some time, say in class or in the school compound, I had to first find a wall or a tree to hold myself onto. In those first few minutes, I could feel a warm sensation throughout my body, as if I was sweating, and only saw darkness.

Things only changed a bit in 1998, my final year of secondary school. That year, a man from my home village in Buyende, who was a driver at the Kamuli District headquarters, told my mom, “I see your son in town, but he is living a very difficult life. This year, I need you to let him stay with me [in Kamuli town]”. That’s the only year I ate food. But the psychological scars remained.

These are the reasons I believe that giving up on the Global Goals isn’t simply about a wasted 2030. It is about going back into intractable poverty, whether that means me as a person, or other people across the global south who are battling poverty the same way.

 

A word to the development sector:

For too long, the role of ending extreme poverty has been placed in the hands of people who do not live in the communities facing extreme poverty, and today, only a tiny fraction (or ~1%) of all global antipoverty funding goes directly to grassroots organizations in the global south. But that is exactly why entire communities in places like ours have either remained silent, with nothing happening to end extreme poverty, or only see short-term interventions that come and go.

I have never been outside of Africa, but I know a few things about the rest of the world, and what I can say is: if we picked the most effective anti-homelessness agency say in Tokyo, to come and end homelessness on Skid Row, in Los Angeles, say for 5 or even 20 years, the homelessness really won’t end. The only way homelessness there can end, is by putting the people of Skid Row and Los Angeles themselves, directly in charge of ending homelessness.

Extreme poverty, too, can’t be any different.

Four years ago, I wrote a post that not only invited immediate response from the global effective altruism community, but also confirmed what I had long suspected: many people out there are either convinced that the extreme poor especially here in Africa are potential fraudsters, or that their grassroots organizations are simply not effective — so, a real effort to end extreme poverty must instead be led by more “legitimate” people, which by default means western charities.

But again, if the most effective anti-homelessness agency from Tokyo can’t end homelessness on Skid Row, extreme poverty, too, can only end when those of us who are living in extreme poverty, are directly in charge of ending it.

Let’s do just that: shift power, and flip the other 99% of global antipoverty funding directly to those of us living in extreme poverty. Put us at the helm.

Short of this, I fear extreme poverty is going to remain a perpetual problem, and the Global Goals will be a waste. Let’s repurpose 2030 now.

 

And to the global Black community: 

My people, we are becoming the face of world poverty, and the reason is twofold:

On the one hand, we Black people value status, and are only open to working together with our fellow Black people who have themselves already moved up the ladder. Today, it is somewhat easier for ordinary poor Africans like me to be friends with some wealthy white man, say, from Washington, than to be friends with the lowest ranking Black TikToker — let alone other more successful Black people who have the means to influence an end to poverty.

On the other, we are the ones who have mostly embraced the idea that our people who are living in chronic poverty are probably wrong people and that, even if the goal is to end extreme poverty, we must always be careful who we work with.

While the international media and the predominantly white global development sector are the ones who have promoted the idea that “only large, established brand names” (1, 2, 3) — which by default means western charities — are the ones you must always support when it comes to helping the poor, it is still relatively easy for an ordinary African like me to find people who are ready to work with me on extreme poverty — but not a single Black person, except those in my own community who themselves live in abject poverty.

Not because we Black people do not care about ending poverty, no — there are countless Black people at the Global Citizen Festival and other similar events every year — but because we are the ones who have mostly embraced the idea that our people living in chronic poverty may be risky.

Recently, I came up with an idea that, since the poverty in my region isn’t relenting, and everything else won’t work, what if I simply invited people across the world to physically come and work with us to install one solution to poverty? So, I created a page about it — not asking for money, but inviting people to come work with us in person — and one of the people I asked to help spread word is a Black French national who has spent years decrying “oppression” in the west.

Their response? This isn’t something they can share publicly due to concerns about “reliability.”

By contrast, when I was starting the UCF 12 years ago — with no work on the ground yet, and myself still starving — a few people, none of them Black, still gave us a little help.

Let’s change the way we work together to end Black poverty.

–

Anthony Kalulu is a farmer in eastern Uganda. He is also founder of the
nonprofit Uganda Community Farm, working to end extreme poverty.

Anthony (right), examining sorghum heads with other farmers in Kamuli, 2022.