Progress Dashboard 2020

n 2016, Johnson & Johnson made an initial five-year SDG Commitment focused in five areas where the Company was uniquely positioned to create sustainable and scalable impact, and to leverage our strengths. The five areas include health workforce, women’s and children’s health, essential surgery, global disease challenges, and environmental health.

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Through our commitment, we mobilized and inspired employees, consumers, communities and our global network to help improve health globally. While we aim to achieve outcomes in all the Company’s work, the identified targets for our SDG commitment are reflective of the Company’s reach—individuals whose lives are expected to benefit from our combined efforts with our partners. To that end, we developed a measurement-reporting framework that involved the annual tracking of progress toward focus area targets, ensuring accountability of our work. The Company’s initial SDG commitment focused on SDGs 3, 5 and 17.

The cumulative progress reported in the dashboard below is for the 2016 - 2020 timeframe and represents the final report for our initial SDG commitment. We exceeded 4 of the 5 targets across the aspirations of health workforce, essential surgery, global disease challenges and environmental health. We did not fully achieve our target relating to women’s & children’s health due to a change in strategy. Additional detail on our cumulative, five-year efforts through year-end 2020 are included in our full UN Sustainable Development Goals Commitment Progress Scorecard and the external Assurance Statement associated with it. Beginning in 2021, new commitments to the SDGs are reflected within each of our new Health for Humanity 2025 Goals.

Challenges of reporting and assuring progress against the SDG goals

Collaboration is at the heart of the SDGs – these ambitious goals cannot be achieved by one party alone but involve governments, businesses and communities working together to achieve significant sustainability impacts and improvements to people’s lives. We believe our commitment to partnership and collaboration helps us to achieve extraordinary results even though quantifying impacts and benefits across many partnerships is complex.

We have therefore reported and sought assurance on the progress against the five-year targets that support our SDG Goals. We have reported on progress based on the best information we have available, from our operations and those of our partners. However, we recognize that because of the nature of the projects supporting the targets, the data are subject to limitations including estimates, extrapolations and reliance on data and information provided by a broad range of partners we work with to achieve these goals. For certain goals, assumptions are used that could result in an overstatement or understatement of lives benefited when we are trying to quantify performance in challenging environments. We summarize in our SDG Commitment Progress Scorecard some key information to provide our stakeholders with some insight into the challenges of reporting SDG Goal performance.