Afghanistan Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
161
SDG Index rank, out of 169 countries
48.78
SDG Index score, out of 100
87
Spillover rank, out of 169 countries
89.90
Spillover score, out of 100
Source: Sustainable Development Report 2026, SDSN / Dublin University Press
Most people have never heard of the Sustainable Development Goals in any real detail. Surveys across the US, UK, France, and Germany find only 8–12% of people can actually say what the SDGs are. RYB exists to close that gap, looking at the same reports and reviews the UN and researchers use, and explaining them as we go.
Afghanistan’s second Voluntary National Review was presented at the UN in July 2021, titled “Realizing Self-Reliance by Accelerating SDG Implementation.” Weeks later, the government that wrote it no longer existed. Kabul fell to the Taliban that August, and no VNR has been presented since. Afghanistan’s SDG Index score, 48.78 out of 100, ranking 161st out of 169 countries, is the lowest RYB has covered on this site so far, and twelve of its seventeen goals rate the dashboard’s worst color, red, also the most of any country covered.
Afghanistan Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
AF
Voluntary National Reviews: A Report From a Government That No Longer Exists
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan presented its first Voluntary National Review in 2017 and its second in July 2021, describing plans built around its second National Peace and Development Framework, launched a year earlier, and a set of 16 nationalized goals, 110 targets, and 177 indicators tailored to the country’s own circumstances. The 2021 review reported that Afghanistan’s poverty rate had already climbed to 54% by 2017, up from 39% in 2014, a reversal the government itself acknowledged on SDGs 1 and 2 even before that year’s events.
The government that presented that review collapsed within weeks of the HLPF session ending. No VNR has been presented since, and none is realistically expected while the current authorities remain unrecognized by the UN system that the review process runs through.
Afghanistan’s 2021 Voluntary National Review, Key Messages →
Voluntary Local Reviews: “Not Applicable”
Afghanistan’s own 2021 national report to the Global Observatory on Local Democracy and Decentralization addresses Voluntary Local and Subnational Reviews directly, and like Bulgaria’s equivalent report, answers “Not applicable.” No Afghan city or province has produced one, before or since 2021.
What the Sustainable Development Report Shows: The Lowest Score, and a Dashboard That Explains Why
The Sustainable Development Report scores every country two ways. The overall score measures how well a country is doing for its own people. The spillover score measures how much harm a country’s economy causes everyone else.
Afghanistan’s overall score sits at 48.78 out of 100, ranking 161st out of 169 countries, near the very bottom of the global table. Its spillover score sits at 89.90 out of 100, ranking 87th, a middling position, and a reminder that even a country in acute crisis can still rank around the world’s median on international harm, simply by trading and investing too little abroad to cause much of it either way.
Why Afghanistan’s Spillover Score Is Unremarkable, Not Strong
- Weapons exports are exactly zero. Afghanistan records no measurable arms exports at all, the only country RYB has covered with a literal zero on this indicator.
- Plastic waste exports are negligible. At 0.002 kg per capita, Afghanistan’s figure is among the lowest RYB has recorded, alongside India’s 0.003 kg.
- Support for UN-based multilateralism is weak. Afghanistan’s score sits at just 37.7 out of 100, the lowest RYB has recorded so far, well behind Pakistan’s 55.4 or Bosnia and Herzegovina’s 69.0.
Where the Work Remains
The scale of the gap is worth stating plainly. The poverty headcount ratio at $3.00 a day sits at 42.6%, and at $4.20 a day, 61.1%, both the highest figures RYB has recorded for any country on this site. Prevalence of undernourishment stands at 28.1%, and 44.6% of children under five show signs of stunting, rating the dashboard’s worst possible score. Maternal mortality, 520.5 per 100,000 live births, is roughly sixty times higher than the lowest figures RYB has recorded elsewhere on this site. Afghanistan’s Corruption Perceptions Index score, 16 out of 100, and its Statistical Performance Index, 54.4 out of 100, are both the weakest RYB has recorded for any country covered so far.
One figure needs a direct correction rather than a citation. The database’s own “seats held by women in national parliament” figure records 27%, a number carried forward from before August 2021. Afghanistan’s elected parliament was dissolved along with the rest of the Islamic Republic’s government; no woman holds any position in the current administration, and the UN itself described Afghanistan in 2023 as the world’s most repressive country for women. The Global Gender Gap Index ranked Afghanistan dead last, 146th out of 146 countries, in its most recent assessment. Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10) rates grey on Afghanistan’s dashboard, “insufficient data,” the honest reflection of a country where the statistical infrastructure to measure this kind of thing has itself collapsed.
Climate Action (SDG 13) is the one goal rated green, and it is worth reading the same way as Pakistan’s identical green rating on the page before this one: it reflects Afghanistan’s very low per-capita carbon emissions, not any climate policy achievement, and in a country this poor, low emissions are closer to a symptom of collapsed economic activity than a sign of anything working well.
Afghanistan’s spillover rank sits alongside every other country RYB tracks on the Global Responsibility page, where rankings like these are shown together across all the countries covered on this site.
Why These Numbers Matter
These pages matter more than their topic suggests on the surface. The SDGs are, in effect, the world’s working roadmap for its biggest shared problems, yet most citizens have never engaged with them directly. A Voluntary Local Review can change that at the scale where it’s most achievable: one city, one community, people who might otherwise never cross paths brought into the same conversation about what their home needs most.
Afghanistan has no VNR, no VLR, and, on twelve of seventeen goals, no meaningful progress to report right now. RYB tracks Afghanistan anyway, because a Culture of Peace framework exists precisely for countries where formal development reporting has broken down entirely, not only for countries where it’s thriving.
RYB’s Place in This Picture
RYB tracks Afghanistan because its page looks unlike every other country covered on this site, not because the numbers are worse, though they are, but because the institutions that normally produce these numbers have themselves stopped functioning. A VNR written by a government that fell within weeks. A parliament figure describing a body that no longer exists. A dashboard where even measuring inequality is currently impossible. Afghanistan’s case is what happens to the SDG framework itself when the state behind it collapses.
Looking Forward
Watch whether any future Afghan government, recognized or not, produces a third VNR, and what baseline it would even use given how much has changed since 2021. Watch whether Afghanistan’s HDI, still below its 2017 peak, continues the modest recovery seen in the most recent data. And watch SDG 10 specifically, still unmeasurable on the dashboard, for any sign that basic statistical capacity is being rebuilt.
UNDP
Human Development Report — Afghanistan
The Human Development Index measures something narrower and older than the SDGs: life expectancy, education, and income, combined into a single score, with no 2030 deadline attached. It is a different lens on the same country, worth reading alongside the SDG data above rather than instead of it.
Afghanistan’s HDI reached 0.496 in 2023, up from 0.462 in 2022, the first year of growth after a decline, but still below the 0.506-0.511 range recorded in 2017-2020, before the 2021 collapse. It remains the lowest HDI of any country in South Asia, “low human development” tier, the same tier as Pakistan but below it. Adjusted for inequality, Afghanistan’s IHDI falls to 0.321, worth reading in full on UNDP’s own page, alongside the stark regional gap between Kabul and its surrounding provinces (0.568, the only “medium” tier region in the country) and the south (0.423, the lowest).
Sources
- SDG Index database, Sustainable Development Report 2026 — Fuller, G., Iablonovski, G., Lafortune, G. and Sachs, J.D. (2026), SDSN / Dublin University Press, DOI:10.82163/225
- Sustainable Development Report 2026, Afghanistan profile — dashboards.sdgindex.org
- Voluntary National Review 2021, Afghanistan, Key Messages — hlpf.un.org
- Afghanistan National Report, Global Observatory on Local Democracy and Decentralization (GOLD), UCLG — gold.uclg.org
- Afghanistan’s lessons for the Sustainable Development Goals, Brookings — brookings.edu
- Women in Afghanistan, background reference — en.wikipedia.org
- List of SAARC countries by HDI, background reference — en.wikipedia.org
- List of regions of Afghanistan by Human Development Index, background reference — en.wikipedia.org