Data quality and feasibility issues with industry‐related Sustainable Development Goal targets for Sub‐Saharan African countries

Abstract Manufacturing output, employment, and resource use were entirely missing from the Millennium Development Goals but now play a central role in the newly formulated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this paper, we analyze the quality of databases for assessing progress by Sub‐Saharan African countries towards meeting industry‐related SDG targets. We find data quality issues least severe for two out of the five conventional economic indicators but extremely severe for the other three economic indicators, moderately severe for the one employment indicator, and extremely severe for the six environmental indicators except for energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. We also assess the feasibility of meeting conventional economic, employment, and energy targets by the year 2030 and find that they are overly optimistic for most countries. We propose setting additional and more realistic targets based on past country performance.