5 countries including Ethiopia have half of the poor citizens
° The poverty rate is three times higher in countries at war
According to a new report issued by the United Nations Development Program, more than 1 billion people in the world live in extreme poverty.
The United Nations said more than half of the victims were children.
According to this report released by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), India has the highest number of people living in extreme poverty, with 234 million of its 1.4 billion people living in poverty.
Five countries — India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo — account for nearly half of the 1.1 billion poor, according to the 2024 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report.
The five countries with the highest number of people in poverty are India (234 million), Pakistan (93 million), Ethiopia (86 million), Nigeria (74 million) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (66 million).
In 2023, when the world saw the worst conflicts since the Second World War, it was pointed out that the poverty rate was three times higher in countries at war.
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) have been collecting data from 112 countries with a population of 6.3 billion every year since 2010.
Thus, the report used criteria such as lack of housing, sanitation, electricity supply, food fuel, nutrition and school attendance as indicators of poverty.
As a result, 1.1 billion people are living in multidimensional poverty, of which 455 million are living in conflict.
“For the poor in conflict-affected countries, the struggle for their basic needs is dire and desperate,” said UNDP chief statistician Yanchun Zhang.
The report also showed that 584 million people under the age of 18 are living in extreme poverty, of which 27.9 percent are children.
The adults are 13.5 percent.
In addition, 83.2 percent of the world’s poor live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.