Counting the number of people living in extreme poverty — on less than $3 a day — is only part of the picture. We also need to understand who they are, where they live, and how their circumstances have changed.
A new paper using household surveys from 154 economies, covering 96 percent of the world’s population, examines the characteristics of people living in extreme poverty from 2003 to 2024. Although extreme poverty has declined worldwide, it is increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, fragile economies, rural communities, younger populations, and people with limited education. Advances in urbanization and education — both strongly associated with poverty reduction in East and South Asia—have produced much smaller gains in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Global extreme poverty is increasingly concentrated
The world has made substantial progress in reducing extreme poverty, but that progress has slowed over the past decade.
As the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined, those who remain are increasingly concentrated in rural areas, among younger people and those without formal education, and across clusters of neighboring high-poverty regions. Extreme poverty is therefore becoming more entrenched in fewer places, which are also the places where progress in reducing poverty has mostly stalled over the last decade. Figure 1 shows this growing geographic concentration and the limited progress in poverty reduction in many of these areas.
