Voluntary National Reviews 2026

What the 36 countries are saying

Read together, the 2026 messages are strikingly consistent. Nearly every country frames the year as the final stretch to 2030 and pivots from assessing progress to accelerating it, under a shared set of external pressures. A few themes run through almost all of them.

• Financing and debt, above all. The most universal theme is fiscal space: domestic resource mobilization as the backbone, paired with calls to reform the global financial architecture and deliver debt relief. Rwanda quantifies a financing gap near 9% of GDP (about US$1 billion a year); Gabon reports debt service at 17% of its 2024 budget; Somalia describes external debt falling from 64% to 12.4% of GDP after relief. Integrated national financing frameworks recur (Egypt, Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi).
• Leave no one behind, as the organizing principle. Brazil proposes to “radicalize” the idea through tax justice, and even floats a new goal on ethnic-racial equality. Uruguay presses past national averages to child poverty and disability; Norway anchors it in the welfare state.
• Climate shocks, especially for small islands and least-developed countries. Jamaica reports that Hurricane Melissa (2025) cost the equivalent of 56.7% of its 2024 GDP; the Marshall Islands and Kiribati frame sea-level rise as existential; Somalia reports a drought emergency with 40% of people in acute food insecurity.
• Localization and whole-of-society delivery. Voluntary Local Reviews are everywhere: Switzerland files its first sub-national reviews from cantons and cities, Italy reframes its whole review around youth and local government, and Saudi Arabia reports dozens of local plans while Brazil runs a national “My Municipality for the SDGs” drive.
• Peace as a precondition. A pronounced 2026 note: Bahrain frames its review around being attacked, the DRC and Mozambique around active conflict, and Estonia and Moldova around the war in Ukraine.

The measurement story

This is the thread SDGCounting watches most closely, and in 2026 it is loud. Statistical capacity, data disaggregation, and the financing of statistics come up again and again, most often as a binding constraint rather than a footnote. The picture is two-sided: real gains in a few places, persistent gaps in many.

• The best improvement story is Somalia: SDG data availability rose from 39% (2022) to 70% (2025) through its national statistics bureau, which now runs an online goal tracker. Jordan reports a similar climb, from 57.7% (2017) to 76.1% (2025).
• The gaps are just as candid. Burundi reports that 35% of its targets are simply not assessable for lack of data. The DRC, running its second population census to fix this, judges only 14.8% of targets on track and 36.1% regressing. Moldova returns repeatedly to how “lack of disaggregated data limits the effectiveness of public policies.”
• Framework-building is visible. The UAE reports a 248-indicator national framework; Estonia publishes its indicators through an open “Tree of Truth” dashboard; Guinea has built a digital monitoring platform. The recurring bottleneck across African least-developed countries and small island states is timeliness, disaggregation, and the money to sustain statistical production.

The pattern echoes the SDG Report 2026’s own warning: progress is only as visible as the data behind it, and the data is thinnest exactly where the stakes are highest.

Our read

Country by country

A page for each of the 36 presenting countries, drawn from its own main messages, in the country’s own framing. Figures are as each government reported them. Where a country states which review this is, the edition is noted on the card.

Documents & resources

• Voluntary National Reviews 2026, the official HLPF hub for this year’s reviews.
• Country reports database, each nation’s full VNR as it publishes.
• HLPF 2026 documentation, home of the compilation of main messages (E/HLPF/2026/5).
• VNR 2026 Handbook, the preparation guidance countries follow.
• VNR database, every review from every year.
• HLPF 2026 coverage, where these reviews are presented.

The country capsules are drawn from each government’s own 2026 main messages; figures are as each country reported them and were not independently verified. Several documents were reviewed in French, Spanish or Portuguese and translated. Edition numbers are given only where a country states its own, and should be checked against the UN VNR database before citing.