Where is poverty happening

We push for long-term change. We will never give up. Until the world is free from hunger. Action Against Hunger is leading a global movement to end hunger in our lifetimes. It innovates solutions, advocates for change, and reaches 25 million people every year with proven hunger prevention and treatment programs.

As a nonprofit that works across 50 countries, its 8, dedicated staff members partner with communities to address the root causes of hunger, including climate change, conflict, inequity, and emergencies.

It strives to create a world free from hunger, for everyone, for good. With the generous support of people like you, our emergency teams are helping save lives, providing lifesaving treatment to malnourished children and delivering urgent food and water. Together, we can take urgent action to prevent children from sliding even deeper into tragedy. Now is the time to act and help children survive.

Global Poverty And Hunger Learn how global poverty relates to hunger and how you can take action to save lives. Poverty Leads to Hunger One in three children in low- and middle-income countries suffers from chronic undernutrition.

Global Poverty Facts Here are some statistics that show the scale of global poverty and its devastating effects.

At least 14 million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition around the world. Without good roads, traveling takes forever. Without public transport, it may be next to impossible to get a good job or even to the store. However, many governments are either unable or unwilling to serve the poor. This might mean failing to provide or cutting social welfare programs, redirecting funds away from those who need it, failing to build good infrastructure, or actively persecuting the population.

If a government fails to meet the needs of the poor, the poor will most likely stay that way. People who are poor are more likely to suffer from bad health, and those with bad health are more likely to be poor.

This is because healthcare is often too expensive or inaccessible to those who need it. Without money for medicine and treatment, the poor have to make really tough decisions, and usually essentials like food take priority. If people do seek treatment, the cost often ruins their finances.

The last root of poverty is simple: stuff costs too much. Even the basics can be too expensive. Measuring poverty by the headcount ratio provides information that is straightforward to interpret; by definition, it tells us the share of the population living with consumption or incomes below some minimum level. The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than 1.

In the map we show available estimates of the extreme poverty headcount ratio, country by country. The map shows the latest available estimates by default, but with the slider immediately below the map you can explore changes over time. Estimates are again expressed in international dollars int.

This means that figures account for different price levels in different countries, as well as for inflation. Hence, it is both interesting and important to measure poverty with higher poverty lines.

The World Bank also reports poverty headcount ratios using a higher line at 3. Measuring poverty through headcount ratios does not capture the intensity of poverty—individuals with consumption levels marginally below the poverty line are counted as being poor just as individuals with consumption levels much further below the poverty line.

The most common way to deal with this is to measure the shortfall from the poverty line, the amount of money required by a poor household to reach the poverty line. It tells us the fraction of the poverty line that people are missing, on average, in order to escape poverty. There is a strong correlation between the incidence of poverty and the intensity of poverty: sub-Saharan Africa, where the share of people below the poverty line is higher, is also the region where people tend to be furthest below the poverty line.

Interestingly, the correlation is very strong, but is far from perfect. As discussed above, the poverty gap index is often used in policy discussions because it has an intuitive unit percent mean shortfall that allows for meaningful comparisons regarding the relative intensity of poverty. The two visualizations show the absolute yearly monetary value of the poverty gap, for the world top chart and country by country bottom chart.

The numbers come from multiplying the poverty gap index, by both the poverty line and total population. As we can see, the monetary value of the global poverty gap today is about half of what it was a decade ago. This shows that in recent years we have substantially reduced both the incidence and the intensity of poverty. Below we summarize how poverty has changed over the last two centuries. How historians know about the history of poverty is the focus of a longer text that you find here: How do we know the history of extreme poverty?

The World Bank only publishes data on extreme poverty from onwards, but researchers have reconstructed information about the living standards of the more distant past. The seminal paper on this was written by Bourguignon and Morrison in In this paper, the two authors reconstruct measures of poverty as far back as The poverty line of 1. This difference in the definition of poverty should be kept in mind when comparing the following graph to those discussed in other sections of this entry.

In , the vast majority of people lived in extreme poverty and only a tiny elite enjoyed higher standards of living. Economic growth over the last years completely transformed our world, with the share of the world population living in extreme poverty falling continuously over the last two centuries. This is even more remarkable when we consider that the population increased 7-fold over the same time. In a world without economic growth, an increase in the population would result in less and less income for everyone.

A 7-fold increase in the world population would be potentially enough to drive everyone into extreme poverty. Yet, the exact opposite happened. In a time of unprecedented population growth, we managed to lift more and more people out of the extreme poverty of the past.

It is very difficult to compare income or consumption levels over long periods of time because the available goods and services tend to change significantly, to the extent where even completely new goods and services emerge.

This point is so significant that it would not be incorrect to claim that every person in the world was extremely poor in the 19th century. Nathan Rothschild was surely the richest man in the world when he died in But the cause of his death was an infection—a condition that can now be treated with antibiotics sold for less than a couple of cents.

Today, only the very poorest people in the world would die in the way that the richest man of the 19th century died. This example is a good indicator of how difficult it is to judge and compare levels of prosperity and poverty, especially for the distant past.

The trend over time becomes more clear if one compares the availability of necessities like food, housing, clothing, and energy. As more and more countries industrialized and increased the productivity of work, their economies started to grow and poverty began to decline.

According to the estimates by Bourguignon and Morrison—shown in the visualization—only a little more than a quarter of the world population was not living in poverty by From onwards, we have better empirical data on global extreme poverty.

The Bourguignon and Morrison estimates for the past are based on national accounts and additional information on the level of inequality within countries. The data from onwards come from the World Bank, which bases their estimates on household surveys. See below for more on where historical poverty estimates come from. Since then, the share of extremely poor people in the world has declined very fast—in fact, faster than ever before in world history.

There is also an interactive version of this visualization here. We have seen that the chance of being born into extreme poverty has declined dramatically over the last years. But what about the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty? The visualization combines the information on the share of extreme poverty shown in the last chart, with the number of people living in the world. For the years prior to , we use the mid-point of the estimates from Bourguignon and Morrison as shown in the previous chart; from , we use the World Bank estimates.

As we can see, in there were just under 1. Over the next years, the decline of poverty was not fast enough to offset the very rapid rise of the world population, so the number of non-poor and poor people increased.

Since around , however, we are living in a world in which the number of non-poor people is rising, while the number of extremely poor people is falling. According to the estimates shown here, there were close to 2 billion people living in extreme poverty in the early s, and there were million people living in extreme poverty in In , there were 1.

With a reduction to million in , this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between and , ,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty. Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever. What our history shows us is that it is possible to reduce extreme poverty it is on us to end extreme poverty as soon as possible.

We have already pointed out that in the thousands of years before the beginning of the industrial era, the vast majority of the world population lived in conditions that we would call extreme poverty today.

Productivity levels were low and food was scarce— material living standards were generally very low. The first countries in which people improved their living conditions were those that industrialized first.

The chart shows the decline of extreme poverty in these countries. These estimates come from Ravallion Progress was made at a fast pace—in some cases even at a constant pace. We can definitely end extreme poverty in low income countries, and we can do it soon. Other countries have done it before. Second, we can also see from this chart that despite remarkable progress, in some rich countries—notably the United States—a fraction of the population still lives in extreme poverty.

This is the result of exceptionally high income inequality. See below for more on extreme poverty in rich countries. Above, we provided an overview of recent poverty trends country by country. Here we focus on trends from a regional perspective. The first chart provides regional estimates of poverty counts — the total number of people living below the International Poverty Line in each world region.

The second chart provides regional estimates of poverty rates — the share of population in each region living below the International Poverty Line. As we can see, globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by more than 1 billion during the period; from 1. On average, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined by 47 million every year since On any average day the number of people in extreme poverty declined by , people.

In Sub-Saharan Africa however the number of people in extreme poverty has increased and we explained at the beginning of this entry various projections expect that extreme poverty will be increasingly concentrated in Africa. The following chart shows that the share of people living in extreme poverty has fallen even faster. The International Poverty Line that international organizations like the UN rely on corresponds to 1.

Because of this it is important to measure poverty not just by one very low poverty line, but many other poverty lines as well. The visualization shows the global income distribution in and below we will look at a longer time period. It is of course also adjusted for price changes over time inflation. What this distribution shows is that global income inequality is extremely high. To read the chart below, choose a level of annual income on the y-axis and then use the blue line and the red line to find the corresponding share of the world population living with less than that income on the x-axis.

The first thing that this chart shows is that a large share of the world population lives on very low incomes. The median income in was 2, int. If you want to consider a poverty line higher than the International Poverty Line , you could chose a line of int. This was a decline of 20 percentage points in one decade relative to this higher poverty line.

If you think the international poverty line should be much higher and should instead be 4, int. A decline of 13 percentage points in a decade. But it is clear that the world has made progress against it. What this chart shows is that, no matter what global poverty line you choose, the share of people below that poverty line has declined. The study by Mauro and Hellebrandt 21 on which the above chart is based only has data from onwards.

But there is some good data that allows us to go further back in time, as well as looking at absolute numbers of people in poverty rather than shares. Progress against a poverty line of int. Until a decade decade ago it was only a quarter. The majority of the world population is still very poor. What the cutoff for extreme poverty is helpful for is to focus the attention to those who are the very poorest.

This would not be possible if we would only rely on much higher poverty thresholds. A poverty line of int. The chart below answers the question of how the number of people below different poverty lines is changing.

And the number of people above the poverty line has increased rapidly. The number of people who live on more than 10 dollars per day increased by million in the last 10 years.

The world is making progress against all poverty lines and with rapid growth in many middle income countries we can hope that this progress against poverty relative to high poverty lines will continue. But our focus should be on those in the very worst poverty.

In recent decades, the share in extreme poverty has declined faster than ever before in human history. This post asks whether such remarks are true. Is the substantial decline of global poverty only due to the poverty decline in China? First, let us look at the historical evolution of poverty in China. Shown in dark blue is the declining share of the Chinese population living below the International Poverty Line 1. The decline from almost every Chinese person living in extreme poverty to almost no Chinese people living in extreme poverty is of course an exceptional achievement.

But is this the entire story of falling global poverty? To find the answer we recalculated the share of people living in extreme poverty globally and disregarded China entirely — so that we compare a planet with China to a planet without China.

The chart shows the results. In blue is the decline of global poverty, in red the decline of poverty excluding China. We see that the reduction of global poverty was very substantial even when we do not take into account the poverty reduction in China.

What is also interesting to see in the chart is that until , the inclusion of China increased the share of the world population living in extreme poverty; but since then, this has reversed, and the inclusion of China is now reducing the global poverty headcount ratio.

We care about people — not about countries, and since more than every 5th person in the world is Chinese , it is a really important achievement for the world that extreme poverty has decreased so substantially in China. Despite the clear evidence, many people are not aware of the fact that extreme poverty is declining across the world. The chart shows the perceptions that survey-respondents in the UK have regarding global achievements in poverty reductions.

While the share of extremely poor people has fallen faster than ever before in history over the last 30 years, the majority of people in the UK thinks that the opposite has happened, and that poverty has increased. The extent of ignorance in the UK is particularly bad if we take into account that the shown result corresponds to a population with a university degree.

See the Gapminder Ignorance Project for more evidence. Not only in the UK are many wrongly informed about how poverty is changing globally. The share of correct answers differs substantially across countries. The countries I marked with a star are those that were a low-income or lower-middle-income countries a generation ago in In these poorer countries more people understand how global poverty has changed.

People in rich countries on the other hand — in which the majority of the population escaped extreme poverty some generations ago — have a particularly wrong perception about what is happening to global poverty. While this is a great achievement, there is absolutely no reason to be complacent: a poverty rate of Where do they live?

The following visualization provides a breakdown of this figure by continent and country. These figures come from multiplying estimates of poverty rates by the corresponding estimates of total population in those countries. The poverty rate estimates come from the World Bank PovCal release, using household survey data ; 26 and total population estimates come from the World Development Indicators.

As usual with World Bank estimates, poverty measures are adjusted to account for differences in price levels between countries. As we can see, today, Africa is the continent with the largest number of people living in extreme poverty. The breakdown by continent is as follows:. We can also see that India is the country with the largest number of people living in extreme poverty million people , with Nigeria and the Congo DRC following with 86 and 55 million people, respectively.

These figures are the result of important changes across time. As we mentioned above in our discussion of regional trends, in Asia was the world region with the largest number of poor people million in South Asia, plus million in East Asia and the Pacific. However, with rapid economic growth in Asia over the past two decades, poverty in Asia fell more rapidly than in Africa.

The World Bank Group recently published a new set of poverty estimates, as part of their report Poverty and Shared Prosperity These estimates, explained in detail in two related background papers Newhouse et al. In order to produce disaggregated estimates, the World Bank relied on new data from the Global Micro Database that augments survey data in 89 countries, by providing a set of harmonized household characteristics, enriching the other survey instruments used by the World Bank to measure poverty.

According to the World Bank, the sample of 89 countries included in the Global Micro Database contains an estimated As the authors point out, while not every country is covered, this new set of estimates is the most updated and comprehensive source currently available to researchers and policymakers trying to understand the demographics of poverty. The following visualization uses this source to provide a characterization of those who live in extreme poverty. As we can see, across all world regions the poor tend to be young and live in rural areas.

In the background paper accompanying the data, Castaneda et al. Interestingly, and perhaps also surprisingly, we can see from this visualization that those with no education are now a distinct minority of the population.

Global estimates of child poverty are unfortunately not available. However, as we mentioned above, we can have a reasonable picture of this issue by looking at the estimates recently published by the World Bank using the Global Micro Database. For measurement purposes, children are considered to be poor if they live in a poor household i. A household is considered poor, in turn, if the per capita consumption of its members or per capita income, depending on the country , falls below 1.

This is the standard definition of absolute extreme poverty used by the World Bank. The following chart summarizes the available data. The height of each bar in this plot shows the share of people living in extreme poverty by age group, while the width of the bars reflects the total size of each age group in the overall population. The area of each bar height times width gives the number of individuals living in extreme poverty within each age bracket—these are the numbers written inside each bar.

By looking at the total number of people in extreme poverty area of the bars we can also see another important fact: virtually half of the people living in extreme poverty are under 18 years of age. This is a large share if we consider that those under 18 account for only around a third of the general population as shown by the width of the bars. The above-mentioned data from the Global Micro Database allows us to study poverty across age groups for various poverty lines—not just the International Poverty Line.

The following chart shows the cumulative distribution of welfare for different age groups. Each of the lines in this plot shows, for each age group, the share of the population living below a given level of per capita daily income or consumption after accounting for differences in prices across countries.

Following this logic, we can read the poverty rates at any poverty line. As we can see, the distribution of consumption for adults is always to the right of the distribution for children. In economics lingo, what we observe is that the distribution for adults stochastically dominates that of children. Live in congested urban settings and work in the sectors most affected by lockdowns and mobility restrictions. History shows that urgent and collective action can help us tackle this crisis.

Last Updated: Oct 14, Closing the gaps between policy aspiration and attainment Too often there is a wide gap between policies as articulated and their attainment in practice, and thus between what citizens rightfully expect and what they experience daily.

Policy aspirations can be laudable, but there is likely to be considerable variation in the extent to which they can be realized, and which groups benefit from them.

For example, at the local level, those who have the least influence in a community might not be able to access basic services. At the global level, political economy concerns will be reflected in the extent to which rich and poor nations get access to finite global supplies of medical equipment.

It is critical to forge implementation strategies that can rapidly and flexibly respond to close the gaps. Enhancing learning, improving data Much about the novel coronavirus remains unknown. The speed and scale with which it has affected the world has overwhelmed response systems in rich and poor countries alike. Innovative responses often come from communities and firms, which may have a better sense of the problems that should be prioritized and may enjoy greater local legitimacy to convey and enforce difficult decisions such as stay-at-home requirements.

The faster everyone learns from each other, the more useful it will be. Prevention measures often have low political payoff, with little credit given for disasters averted. Over time, populations with no lived experience of calamity can become complacent, presuming that such risks have been eliminated or can readily be addressed if they happen.

COVID, together with climate change and enduring conflicts, is reminding us of the importance of investing in preparedness and prevention measures comprehensively and proactively. Expanding cooperation and coordination Contributing to and maintaining public goods requires extensive cooperation and coordination.

This is crucial for promoting widespread learning and improving the data-driven foundations of policymaking, and for forming a sense of shared solidarity during crises and ensuring that the difficult policy choices by officials are both trusted and trustworthy. The World Bank Group works to end poverty in several ways: Funding projects that can have transformational impacts on communities Collecting and analyzing the critical data and evidence needed to target these programs to reach the poorest and most vulnerable Helping governments create more inclusive, effective policies that can benefit entire populations and lay the groundwork for prosperity for future generations.

Some examples: Grow Cambodia has achieved remarkable progress in reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity, but key reforms are needed to sustain pro-poor growth. Mexico has experienced high income inequality and concentration of poverty in a few states.