The growing availability of data coupled with advanced methods and computing power have fostered organizations to adopt business analytics in their decision‐making. Nevertheless, the application of analytics is subject to available resources and capabilities, and, therefore, differs from region to region. Developing countries in particular are exposed to circumstances that can limit the expansion of analytics within their domains. This may prohibit the acceleration of development efforts and, consequently, may result in delays in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) set for 2030. Taking this concern as a starting point, this paper provides the results of a survey on the status of analytics research in developing countries. Through a thorough review and classification of 142 articles published during 2009–2019, we characterize analytics in developing countries along three dimensions. First, we explore the mainstream methodologies appearing in the literature, which range from classic optimization techniques to more recent statistical and machine learning methods. Second, we identify 11 application areas that cover a broad range. Third, we focus on the linkages between the reviewed papers and the 17 UNSDGs. Along this dimension, we establish a connection between the literature and 13 goals, and illustrate how some of these contributions relate to some of the 169 targets set by United Nations. Goals such as gender equality are addressed to either little or no extent by the surveyed literature. Also, the survey reveals no adoption of indicators that are set to track the progress toward the targets.