Expectations for any sort of substantial outcome to the Group of 20 summit this weekend in Johannesburg were already pretty low. And they are falling fast.

President Donald Trump declined to attend the annual gathering of leaders from the world’s largest economies. The United States did not even send a delegation—an unprecedented snub, especially since the United States is set to host the next G20 in 2026 and this year’s meeting is the first convened on African soil.

Mr. Trump has not hesitated to express his unhappiness with South Africa—during an infamous Oval Office meeting with the African state’s president Cyril Ramaphosa, he promoted the erroneous notion of a white genocide in South Africa. But the U.S. boycott also speaks to an “America First” mentality that has led the United States to step back from overseas assistance to the poorest nations of the world—most now located in Africa.

In January Mr. Trump cheered on Elon Musk, the world’s richest human, as he led a “cost cutting” rampage that put an end to 60 years of foreign aid disbursements from the now-terminated U.S. Agency for International Development.

And at the end of September, the president allowed the 25-year-old African Growth and Opportunity Act program to expire. In a bid to encourage poverty relief through economic growth, the trade program had allowed African countries duty-free access to the U.S. market. Now, countries like Lesotho, Kenya and Madagascar, as well as G20 host South Africa, already suffering from high unemployment, are shedding even more jobs.

The traditional joint communiqué detailing global priorities and an action plan is not expected to be issued at the end of the Johannesburg summit. “Given the divisions in the global community, it will be difficult to reach the kind of consensus that everyone agrees on,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was involved in G20 preparations, told KNA, a news service for the Catholic Church in Germany. “These are not normal times.”

Indeed, this low-expectation summit might be emblematic of an emerging era of declining ambition and diminishing returns in the fight to end global poverty. In 2015, world leaders enthusiastically embraced the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, an agenda—including specific campaigns to improve education, sanitation and address gender disparities worldwide—that hoped to essentially eradicate world poverty by 2030.

That potential outcome seemed at the time not merely an expression of diplomatic idealism. After China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, global trade, in a matter of just a few decades, proved one of the most successful drivers of poverty reduction in human history. There was good reason to believe the U.N.’s S.D.G.s were practically achievable and that a world without absolute want was in reach.

The Covid-19 pandemic knocked those hopes back badly. Since then, war, weather and political withdrawal have continued to batter anti-poverty efforts. With the 2030 deadline closing in, many now acknowledge that the S.D.G.’s lofty intentions will not be met. Recent authoritative analyses suggest that anti-poverty efforts have not only stalled; they may be on the verge of reversal.

“There’s increased need and decreasing resources,” Bill O’Keefe confirmed. Mr. O’Keefe is Catholic Relief Services’ vice president for government relations and advocacy. Mr. O’Keefe describes “a vortex” of pressures on the world’s poorest states. “You have the pandemic impacts. You have the debt crisis…changing climate—so more disasters, floods, droughts—and then, frankly, too, just uncertainty in the global trade architecture.”

“Conflict, of course, aggravates all those other factors and puts the most vulnerable people at even greater risk,” Mr. O’Keefe said. The most unfortunate states are dealing with a combination of these dilemmas or even all of them simultaneously.

The United Nations’ 2024 Sustainable Development Goals Report finds that after years of progress on poverty reduction, in 2025, 808 million people—or one in 10 people worldwide—were living in extreme poverty, defined as subsisting on less than $3 per person per day at 2021 purchasing power parity. If current trends continue, according to the report, about 9 percent of the world’s population “will still live in extreme poverty by 2030.”

“A shocking revelation” has been the resurgence of global hunger to levels last observed in 2005. “Equally concerning is the persistent increase in food prices across a larger number of countries,” U.N. researchers said. “This dual challenge of poverty and food security poses a critical global concern.”

According to the S.D.G. report card, nearly half of the 17 targets are showing minimal or moderate progress, “while over a one-third are stalled or going in reverse, since they were adopted by UN Member States back in 2015 to bring peace and prosperity for people and the planet.”

A recent analysis of trends in global poverty, authored by Max Roser for Our World in Data, a project sponsored by the United Kingdom’s Global Change Data Lab, begins with the good news: Over just three decades, the number of people in the world who lived in conditions of extreme poverty declined by 1.5 billion.

Mr. Roser expects some momentum going forward, predicting the number of people in extreme poverty will decline from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, however, current trends suggest “progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt” and the number of extremely poor people will begin to rise again.

After years of rapid economic expansion, especially across Asia, the economies of the remaining low-income states have stagnated, Mr. Roser reports. If they remain stuck, hundreds of millions of people will continue to live in extreme poverty.

Corruption and economic inequality play a role in perpetuating poverty, of course. The world’s poorest nations often score the highest among nations hobbled by corruption, according to Transparency International. And the world’s poorest states often also suffer the worst inequity in wealth and income distribution.

But poor nations are foundering at the same time the world’s affluent nations have taken substantial steps away from global obligations to counter poverty. Other drivers of poverty are phenomena that the world’s wealthiest nations can address: turning back greenhouse gas emissions that power climate change, reforming international finance and sharing the wealth that can make life-and-death differences in low-income, high-poverty nations.

Why are world leaders shrugging off what had been perceived as a moral obligation not too long ago? Donor fatigue has some role in the fallback. But something deeper appears to be at work.

Mr. O’Keefe suggests that the “globalization of indifference” that Pope Francis frequently warned about is at work in the diminishing esteem and optimism for anti-poverty efforts.

A less observed contributor to poverty’s revival has been global debt, according to Mr. O’Keefe. Global poverty is focused now in Africa, as is global sovereign indebtedness. It is not a coincidence.

“There needs to be a way for countries to file for something like bankruptcy and renegotiate their debts in a way that’s just and fair so that their debt burdens are more sustainable,” Mr. O’Keefe said.

“Developing countries continue to cut teachers and health care workers in order to pay their debt,” Eric LeCompte, the executive director of Jubilee USA Network, a Catholic debt-justice advocacy, wrote in an email to America. Mr. LeCompte was in Johannesburg to attend the G20. “Most countries here in Africa are spending half to two-thirds of their revenue on paying their debts while hunger across the continent increases.”

He said that because of debt, in Sub-Saharan Africa, “one out of five kids under the age of five will die this year from malnutrition and preventable diseases.” Developing countries saddled with debt are also unable to invest in climate mitigation and adaptation to weather catastrophes. Poverty reduction will never succeed without reform of the global finance and debt system, he said.

The church has for decades pressed for a reform of the international debt system, beginning with notable successes at debt forgiveness achieved by St. John Paul II in the millennial campaign against debt in 2000. Every pope since has called for debt relief as a mechanism of poverty reduction. This Jubilee year, the church sponsored a global campaign through Caritas Internationalis, “Turn debt into hope.”

Despite the uncertainty at this year’s summit, Mr. LeCompte remains confident that the church and other humanitarian and anti-poverty advocates “are building a consensus on ending poverty.”

Those campaigners have won incremental successes, he said. But most wanted now are large-scale efforts that can only be initiated and maintained by the wealthiest states. “We need to move the G20, G7, [International Monetary Fund] and World Bank on more robust policies and implementation.”

“Hopefully those attending the G20 will look at this combination of factors [reviving poverty] and start to think about how to address them holistically,” Mr. O’Keefe said.

Mr. O’Keefe remains confident that C.R.S. can still find support from donors when it details practical solutions to poverty that have been demonstrated successes. “C.R.S.’s donors are incredibly generous and have really responded generously to the challenges and cuts we faced in the last year,” he said. “But people need to be presented with real solutions and approaches they can be confident will work.”

And church and political leaders must be ready “to explain why, from a moral perspective, it’s in the interest of our country to help our brothers and sisters around the world.”

“What’s the point of being the richest and most powerful country in the world if we’re not going to share some of that bounty?” he asked. “What are we, sort of the dragon sitting on top of a pile of gold, jealously guarding it? That’s not the kind of country that most Americans want to live in.

“We have to get back to caring about our neighbor, whoever—and wherever—that neighbor is. That’s what the church teaches and I think we have to keep trumpeting it from the mountaintop.”

Some may argue that “‘well, first we should address our domestic problems, and then when we’re done, we can get to our international problems,’” Mr. O’Keefe says, repeating an infamous analysis from Vice President JD Vance that had been quickly rebutted by Pope Francis.

“But the truth is to end hunger, to provide water to every person around the world, to provide a school meal to every child around the world—these are things that are relatively very inexpensive,” he said. With the assistance of other wealthy donor states, the people of the United States “absolutely” have the capacity to abolish these “scourges” of global poverty.

“Jesus said, ‘The poor you will always have with you.’ There’s always going to be pockets of poverty in different places, but we can do so much better,” Mr. O’Keefe said. “And we know how.”

With reporting from KNA

More from America

A deeper dive

The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week.

For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches. This week, in Charlotte, Catholic parishes respond to an immigration dragnet and in Spain doctors worry about landing on a black list because of their conscientious objection to abortion.

Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).