The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) revealed on Thursday that more than one billion people worldwide are experiencing severe poverty, with half of them being minors.
The annual report, jointly produced with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, expressed particular concern about the threefold increase in poverty rates in war-torn countries, a situation unprecedented since World War II.
Since 2010, the UNDP and the Oxford research center have been calculating the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, which gathers data from 112 countries housing 6.3 billion people.
This index includes indicators such as lack of adequate housing, sanitation, electricity, cooking fuel, food, and schooling systems, as reported by French newspaper Le Figaro.
Yanchun Zhang, Chief Statistician at the UNDP, stated, “The 2024 Poverty Index (for 2023) paints a stark reality: 1.1 billion people are suffering from multidimensional poverty, including 455 million living in conflict zones in war-ravaged countries, where poverty rates are three times higher than in peaceful countries.”
Zhang further explained that in these conflict-affected countries, levels of deprivation faced by the population are three to five times more severe because “for the poor, the struggle to meet basic needs is much harder.”
The report also noted that extreme poverty still disproportionately affects rural areas more than urban settings, with about 84% of the world’s poor living in rural locales.
Children under 18 years old, who make up about 584 million of the poorest minors, face a global poverty rate of 27.9% compared to 13.5% for adults. The vast majority of the poorest of the poor (83.2%) reside in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the most densely populated regions in the world.
The five countries with the strongest demographic growth suffering from extreme poverty include India, with 234 million people lacking essentials out of a population of 1.4 billion; Pakistan, with 93 million people impoverished out of 236 million; Ethiopia, with 86 million out of 123 million; Nigeria, with 74 million out of 218 million; and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 66 million of the very poor live among 100 million people.
