Have Global Organisations Failed Us?
Achieving the SDGs, legitimacy, education & cultural authenticity
I am currently deep into my MBA dissertation research. The terms legitimacy, ethical storytelling, scaling impact ventures, and cultural authenticity are constantly circling around my head — its interconnections forever evolving. It was last week that I came across a study around the public perception and awareness of the Sustainable Development Goals in South Africa, which marks one of the countries I am currently researching. It unsettled something in me, and honestly broke a little piece of my change-maker spirit.
The study marks a small part of research out of Limpopo Province, South Africa. Qualitative interviews across three districts: Vhembe, Mopani, and Capricorn. The researchers asked ordinary people what they knew about sustainable development, later, the SDGs, and the 2030 Agenda. The framework that, in theory, holds the world’s promise to itself.
Most had never heard the term. Yet, it was not about “not caring” — quite the opposite, actually. The underlying issue states as following: The language never reached them, or tried to reach them. Moreover, the SDGs did not reach the communities it aimed to serve.
I want to be honest about what I mean by this article. This here is one study. One province, four districts. A handful of interviews. Hungwe, Muzonka and Munyaradzi, published this year in the African Journal of Public Administration and Environmental Studies. A point of further investigation for the future, and not proof of the universal status quo, although it might. Yet, this research rattled something within me, and I think that’s worth sitting with rather than dismissing because the sample was small.
When the researchers asked the community members directly about the “SDGs”, they got blank stares, but when asked about clean water, education, gender equity, and safety, the answers were more enlightening than some policy report. People are not unaware of the problems they are facing every day. How could they? But, they were unaware that anyone, anywhere, had written those problems into a global promise with a deadline.
We built a framework for the world and forgot to translate it for the world.
The study points to something researchers before have also named. That the SDGs, for all their moral clarity in a conference room, arrive in rural and peri-urban communities dressed in a language that was never theirs. Too technical, mostly English, always abstract. Built by institutions, for institutions, and passed downward like a memo rather than shared and amplified like a promise. One participant out it plainly:
They said that if officials wanted communities involved, the information would need to come in words people actually use, not borrowed ones.
That line sits in your chest, just how it did in mine. And trust me, there is more of them in their 2026 publication.
There is a second notion in the research that I think matters just as much, and gets talked about far less. Even where people did recognise the goals, often younger people, mostly with internet access, most with some tertiary exposure, awareness did not translate into any sense that they could act on it. It appears that everyone who was interviewed did not see themselves as active members of the system, but rather spectators waiting for their governments to start acting — just as they promised.
Almost everyone, across every district, described development as something the government does to them. Not something they can build with anyone. A service they are owed and rarely receive, from an authority that feels distant, or even absent on a bad day. Decades of unmet promises will teach people that participation is pointless long before any framework asks them to participate.
So when global organisations, agencies, institutions, and social impact venturers ask “why isn’t the community engaging with our programme”, maybe that is the wrong question entirely. Maybe the better one states: did we ever invite them in, in a language and a format that made innovation and social change possible?
I think about my own past work and research. I think about how many times I have written SGD 6 into a proposal, deck, social media post. Shorthand that means everything to a funder and nothing to the woman standing in line for water that is not there quite yet.
I have told stories about dignity, female voices, waterless sanitation. I still believe those stories matter. But this study asks a harder question underneath the storytelling we see: are we telling these stories to the people living them, or only about them, for audiences somewhere else entirely?
Have we mistaken visibility in our own circles for legitimacy on the ground?
Have global organisations failed us?
I do not believe the honest answer is a yes. Absolutely not. The goals themselves are not the failure, the purpose behind them is not either. Clean water, gender equity, human rights, education, dignity, etc. These are not wrong asks. But I think the delivery mechanism has failed, in ways we do not examine nearly enough. We have built frameworks in rooms most people will never enter, in a language most people do not use at home, and then measured “impact” by whether the paperwork moved — not by whether a mother in Vhembe ever felt like this agenda belonged to her too.
The researchers’ recommendations are not radical. Teach the goals in schools, in the local languages. Use radio, community theatre, storytelling, and not just PDFs or press releases. Build scorecards communities can actually read, so progress is not something reported at them but something they can see and hold institutions accountable to. Meet young people where their access already is, but do not let a smartphone replace a school or a church hall as the place where this conversation happens.
The indictment is that none of this is complicated.
I do not have a tidy conclusion here. I have a study that made me re-read my own work with suspicion even more than usual, and questions I cannot fully put down. If a framework exists to serve people, and those people have never heard of it (in language they would recognise as their own) whose framework is it, really?
I would love to know what this brings up for you. Reply here, or find me over on LinkedIn, where I share more of my research and applications. And if you have seen this gap — between the language of global development and the people it is meant for — up close, in your own work or your own community, I want to hear that story too. You may find the original research study here.
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