South Africa is developing a coding system to track research progress towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; see I. Capua and E. Giovannini Nature 572, 178; 2019). Known as the South African SDG Hub, this national facility is hosted by the University of Pretoria (sasdghub.org). We invite other institutions, particularly those in Africa, to join us in unlocking the impact of research related to the development goals.

With the support of the national Department of Science and Innovation, the South African SDG Hub collects, classifies and disseminates publicly available peer-reviewed research from South Africa that stands to contribute to any of the topics covered by the goals’ 169 targets.

The hub’s first iteration, in 2017, was compiled manually, but it is now being automated. We are currently completing an SDG text classifier.