THE United Nations warned on Monday that at the current rate of global progress, 575 million people will remain in extreme poverty and 84 million children won’t be going to school in 2030.

In a grim report that exposed the extent of ingrained inequality across the globe, the UN also warned that it will take 286 years to reach equality between men and women.

The report on progress towards achieving 17 wide-ranging UN goals adopted by world leaders in 2015 to improve life for the world’s more than 7 billion people said that only 15 per cent of some 140 specific targets that experts evaluated are on track to be reached by the end of the decade.

Close to half the targets are moderately or severely off track, it said, and of those 30 per cent have either seen no movement at all or regressed including key targets on poverty, hunger and climate.

The 2030 goals include ensuring that hunger is eradicated and nobody lives on less than $2.15 a day which is the extreme poverty line, providing every child with a quality primary and secondary school education, achieving gender equality, ensuring all people have clean water, sanitation and access to affordable energy, reducing inequalities, and taking urgent action to combat climate change.

In a foreword to the report the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said: “Unless we act now, the 2030 agenda could become an epitaph for a world that might have been.”

He said: “Failure to make progress means inequalities will continue to deepen, increasing the risk of a fragmented, two-speed world.”

The report was released ahead of a summit that Mr Guterres has called during the annual gathering of world leaders at the UN general assembly in September, which he said will be “a moment of truth and reckoning.”