The URG Team

Leave no one behind (LNOB) is the central, transformative promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It represents the unequivocal commitment of all UN member States to eradicate poverty in all its forms, end discrimination and exclusion, and reduce the inequalities and vulnerabilities that leave people behind and undermine the potential of individuals and of humanity as a whole.

LNOB thus includes two key elements: combatting discrimination, and combatting rising inequalities within and amongst countries, as well as their root causes.

This policy report focuses on the second of those – combatting inequalities, particularly socio-economic inequalities (often multiple and intersecting).

The UN Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG) recognises that LNOB is grounded in the […] principles of the Charter of the United Nations, [as well as] international human rights law.’ Flowing from and in concert with this point, this policy report argues that LNOB is, at its heart, a human rights vision – equality and non-discrimination are core principles that cut across all human rights, civil and political, as well as economic, social, and cultural, including the right to development.

Many of the barriers people face in accessing services, resources, and opportunities are not simply accidents of fate or a result of insufficient resources, but are rather the result of deliberate government choices, policies, and law-making that create or perpetuate inequalities, or of social practices and norms (that governments either fail to confront or actively encourage) that leave particular groups of people further and further behind.