By Daniel Nardin

With a short – but harsh – speech during one of the thematic sessions of the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF 2026), the general coordinator of the Brazilian Campaign for the Right to Education and member of the Steering Committee of the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education, Andressa Pellanda, reinforced the chorus of discontent in the plenary with representatives from several countries.

At UN Headquarters in New York, US, where the meeting was held this July, she commented that the optimism of the global numbers indicated in the 2026 Report of the Sustainable Development Goals hide a “structural failure”.

“The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is not capable of capturing the reality of middle-income countries, as our panelists have just stated. A middle-income economy does not mean a medium-developed society,” she said during the speech.

By demanding a fairer international financial architecture – including recommending mechanisms to suspend the payment of the debt of these countries – Andressa highlighted the urgency of an effort based on reducing inequalities, fiscal justice and strengthening public funding for social rights, especially public education.  

Political scientist, communicologist and popular educator, Andressa Pellanda is the coordinator of the Brazilian Campaign for the Right to Education, a group that has participated in debates and meetings at the UN on SDG indicators. The Campaign has special consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and is part of the Civil Society Working Group in Brazil for the 2030 Agenda, as well as the National SDG Commission with the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic.

In an interview with Amazônia Vox, Andressa reiterated that the analysis of the Brazilian scenario for SDG 4, which aims at quality education, follows the same line and needs a more attentive and practical look, since “the general numbers often hide inequalities”, she said.

In the Voluntary National Review (VNR) document sent to the UN for the meeting, the Brazilian government addressed education by mentioning the results of two programs. According to the text, Prouni reached the highest number (594,519) of scholarships granted. And the Pé-de-Meia program, according to the document, started to benefit 4 million students, “with an investment of R$ 12.5 billion, reinforcing permanence in school as a policy of equity”.

However, Andressa Pellanda reiterated that education needs to be treated with greater attention, since several indicators have not only not advanced, but have regressed. “Goal targets such as 4.1 (Elementary/Secondary Education) and 4.3 (Professional and Higher Education) are in retrogression. The drop of 1.07 million enrollments in basic education and the lowest number of students in high school in the century are alarming data,” she reinforced.

The coordinator also pointed out that the challenges in early childhood education (goal 4.2) remain high, since the country registers 41.2% of children aged 0 to 3 years in daycare centers, and the goal of the National Education Plan is 50%. In the North region, where 7 of the 9 states of the Legal Amazon are located, the disparity is even greater, with only 23.7%. For her, the numbers reveal that “Brazil still fails to guarantee the right to early childhood education,” she said.

According to Andressa Pellanda, “education is a mirror of inequalities of race, gender and territory, as seen in the reasons for dropping out of school (domestic care and work for black girls, work and violence for men, for example) and in the precarious conditions of schools in rural areas and peripheries”.

Amazon presents a critical situation and requires transversal and urgent action

For the coordinator of the Brazilian Campaign for the Right to Education, the next four years are decisive – since they also mark the final stretch for the fulfillment of the 2030 Agenda – focusing on the goals of the Sustainable Development Goals, agreed upon by the 193 member countries of the UN in 2015.

For this, according to her, Brazil urgently needs to implement the new National Education Plan (Law 15.338/2026), with funding of 10% of GDP and reverse the setback in the goals of SDG 4 (Quality Education). In the national cut, the analyst evaluates that “the Amazon and its population must be placed at the center of an educational policy that is, at the same time, an instrument of social, environmental and territorial justice”, she says.

For the region, Pellanda comments that the North region has the greatest gap in school equipment and infrastructure, with only half of the schools without basic items, and it is necessary to have a local look that considers the effects of climate change, with adaptation actions.

“It is urgent and a priority to invest in green and resilient infrastructure (ecological roofs, rainwater harvesting, solar energy) to adapt schools to climate change, transforming them into centers of community resilience (shelters, support points) in the face of extreme floods and droughts”, she suggests.

Another possible path for the region is an effort for a critical and more territorialized environmental education, close to the realities of the territories. “It is necessary to implement environmental education as a transversal axis in all schools in the country, overcoming the approach of commemorative dates”, she comments. For Andressa Pellanda, the curriculum must be built with the community, integrating traditional knowledge and local reality to form citizens capable of defending their territories.

In this sense, a series of reports by Amazônia Vox produced in 2024 presented initiatives focused on improving exactly these points. In Itacoatiara, Amazonas, students, teachers and the community jointly decided on environmental education actions from schools. These are projects that go beyond the walls of the school and take to the streets, such as raising awareness for waste reduction or the creation of a vegetable garden that serves lunch or even to neighboring residents.

Another point highlighted by Andressa is the training and appreciation of local educators, with a critical and contextualized perspective, including the appreciation of indigenous, quilombola and riverine teachers and education professionals. “They are the main agents of transformation in their territories”, she commented. An example of an initiative along these lines is the work carried out in Manicoré (Amazonas), where the knowledge and ancestral knowledge of the communities is taken to the center of the classroom, as shown in a report also produced by Amazônia Vox in 2024.

Global advances inspire, but data need a critical look

The 2026 Report on the Sustainable Development Goals has indicators that allow the reproduction of the cliché of ‘glass half full or half empty’. Among the positive points highlighted from 2015 to date, almost 1 billion people have gained access to drinking water and 1.2 billion to sanitation. Electricity reaches 92% of the world’s population. “The report celebrates the “data revolution”, with the coverage of indicators jumping from 50% to almost totality, allowing for more accurate monitoring”, comments Andressa.

However, the same report brings alarming points, such as stagnation and setbacks. Of the 139 goals with trend data, only 36% are on track and 15% have regressed compared to 2015. One in ten people still live in extreme poverty and food insecurity affects 2.3 billion. In addition, the number of people affected by climate disasters has more than doubled, which was addressed at the press conference during the launch of the report.

Finally, the report also points out that funding has entered a phase of collapse, with a record 23.1% drop in official development assistance in 2025, influenced in large part by US cuts and wars in which Europe has a strong participation.

For Andressa Pellanda, looking at the report needs to consider a more structural context and local realities. “What remains to be looked at, and the report only superficially mentions, is the deep disconnect between GDP growth and real well-being. The report talks about data, but does not address the central flaw of the system: the GDP metric masks environmental destruction and inequality. The ‘data revolution’ serves a system that measures progress wrongly, a blind spot that developing countries have denounced,” she says.

Pellanda points out that the criticism of GDP as a criterion for classifying countries reflects the distortion caused by indicators that seek to measure the complexity of development. “The SDGs, on the other hand, as a concept, represent an advance by incorporating social and environmental dimensions into 17 goals,” she adds. For her, the problems are in the implementation, in the gap between discourse and practice. “The analysis of SDG 4 (Quality Education) in Brazil, as we have seen, shows that global indicators hide deep setbacks and brutal inequalities,” she points out.

Evidence of this is that six of the 11 global indicators of SDG 4 (Quality Education) do not have official data in Brazil. “Which is a serious flaw and shows that the “data revolution” has not reached everyone and this is also reflected in many of the UN member countries”, comments Pellanda.

This article was originally published on https://www.amazoniavox.com/noticias/view/664/en/un_2026_report_on_sustainable_development_points_to_improvements_but_still_highlights_urgencies