Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Seventeen goals adopted by every UN member state in 2015 — and the Indian organisations working on each.

The greyed goals are ones no cause on Daan maps to yet. We would rather show a goal empty than stretch an organisation into a category it doesn't belong in.

What the Sustainable Development Goals are

In September 2015 every United Nations member state adopted a resolution titled Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. At its centre are seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, usually shortened to the SDGs, and beneath them 169 targets that spell out what each goal actually asks for. They replaced the Millennium Development Goals, which ran from 2000 to 2015 and applied mainly to developing countries; the SDGs apply to every country, rich and poor alike.

The goals are deliberately interlocking rather than a list of separate problems. Clean water (Goal 6) changes how many school days a child actually attends (Goal 4). Reliable electricity (Goal 7) decides whether a rural clinic can refrigerate a vaccine (Goal 3). This is why an organisation—— work rarely sits inside one goal, and why the grid above shows several goals for many of them.

The SDGs in India

India adopted the goals alongside every other member state and reports progress through Voluntary National Reviews presented at the United Nations. Domestically, NITI Aayog is the body coordinating the goals across central ministries and states, and publishes the SDG India Index, which scores every state and union territory against the goals and has been produced in successive editions since 2018.

Government machinery is only part of the picture. A very large share of the work on the ground —� running the school, digging the borewell, staffing the palliative ward —� is done by non-profits, and that is the part this page maps. Each goal above links to the Indian organisations we list working in that area, so the goals stop being a poster and become a list of people you can actually give to.

How to use this page

If you know the goal you care about, open it and browse the organisations. If you are giving as a company, the goal pages are a shortlisting tool: each organisation carries a live website we checked, impact figures copied from its own reports with the source shown, and independent press we fetched and read. What we do not do is score anyone against the UN—— indicator framework —� the mapping from our cause categories to the goals is ours, and it is a way to browse, not an assessment.

Questions

What are the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals?
The Sustainable Development Goals are 17 goals adopted by every United Nations member state in September 2015, in the resolution titled Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They cover poverty, hunger, health, education, gender equality, water and sanitation, energy, decent work, industry, inequality, cities, consumption, climate, oceans, land, peace and partnerships, and they succeeded the Millennium Development Goals, which ran from 2000 to 2015.
How many SDGs are there, and what are the targets?
There are 17 goals, and beneath them 169 targets. The goals are the headline commitments; the targets are the specific outcomes each goal is measured against, tracked through a global indicator framework. A goal is not a single number — Goal 4 on education, for instance, covers early childhood, primary and secondary completion, technical and vocational skills, adult literacy and the state of school buildings.
What is the deadline for the SDGs?
2030. The goals were adopted in 2015 with a fifteen-year horizon, which is why the framework is usually called the 2030 Agenda.
Which SDGs do Indian NGOs work on most?
On this page each goal shows how many organisations we list working in that area. Education, health, and women and children draw the largest numbers of Indian non-profits; goals dealing with energy, industry and marine life draw the fewest, which is visible here rather than hidden — five goals have no organisation on Daan.org at all, and they stay in the grid marked as such.
How does Daan.org map NGOs to the SDGs?
We map our own cause categories to the goals they most closely correspond to — education to Goal 4, hunger to Goal 2, and so on. That mapping is ours, not the UN's. It is a way to browse organisations by goal, not an assessment: no organisation listed here has been evaluated against the UN's SDG indicators, by us or by anyone else.
Can a company use this for CSR reporting?
You can use it to find and shortlist partners working in a goal area. It is not a certification, and it does not measure an organisation's contribution to any indicator. What we do verify is that each organisation is real and operating: a live website it owns, impact figures copied from its own reports with the source shown, and independent press we fetched and checked.