Global Goal #3: Good Health and Well-being

I’m working on a startup. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that yet. But it’s about time I fill you in.

Sockos is a social enterprise that I co-founded, along with three of my Global Challenges colleagues. We’re aiming to get people engaged with the UN’s Global Goals, and organisations that work towards them. How? By producing and selling fun, quirky and meaningful socks!

It’s been a wild ride so far, but that’s not the story I want to tell today. I want to talk about Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being. It’s my favourite of the 17 Goals, and I’m about to explain why.

For me, my personal health and well-being are unfortunately often buried under the mountain of other items on my list of priorities. I know that having a healthy body and mind is important, but on a day-to-day scale, everything else just gets in the way. Uni assignments, part-time work and volunteering all have deadlines attached, and immediate consequences if these deadlines are missed.

Taking care of my health doesn’t have any due date, and if I neglect it temporarily everything seems fine - so it makes sense to skip a gym session when I have an assignment due tomorrow. The issue is that temporary neglect can become a habit, and I rarely end up actually going to the gym. Then I start to realise that there’s a problem. My back starts to ache when I’ve only been sitting in front of my computer for 10 minutes, I start falling asleep around 3pm, I’m restless and irritable. 

We all feel a bit like this guy when we neglect our health and well-being

The thing is, health and well-being are essential for productivity and success, across every industry and profession.

It’s the same on a global scale. We need to be healthy in body and mind if we want to maintain peak performance on the road to achieving the Global Goals. And we will need to be at peak performance. The Global Goals aren’t going to achieve themselves.

The World Bank reports that 50% of the differences in economic growth between developing and developed nations are caused by poor health and low life expectancy. That’s huge. Making progress on Goal 3 will improve economies across the world (Goal 8), helping to alleviate poverty (Goals 1 and 2) and address inequality (Goal 10).

Health can bring us economic wealth, and so much more

Goal 3 aims to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.”

That’s a big job. But it’s one we can’t afford to neglect.