2023-07-12 08:07:54
Twenty-five countries have halved poverty in 15 years, showing that reducing poverty is not impossible, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) said in a new report on Tuesday.
The latest update of the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) including estimates for 110 countries has been released by UNDP and a research center at the University of Oxford.
Trend analysis from 2000 to 2022, focusing on 81 countries with comparable data over time, reveals that 25 countries managed to halve their values in the global MPI in 15 years.
These include Morocco, Cambodia, China, Congo, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Serbia and Vietnam, the document said.
India has thus recorded a remarkable reduction in poverty, with 415 million people lifted out of poverty in just 15 years (2005/6–19/21). A large number of people are no longer in a situation of poverty in China (2010-2014, 69 million) and in Indonesia (2012-2017, 8 million).
Some countries have halved their MPI over short periods ranging from four to 12 years, demonstrating that the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of halving poverty according to national definitions in 15 years is achievable.
Despite these encouraging trends, the lack of post-pandemic data for most of the 110 countries covered by the global MPI limits understanding of the effects of the pandemic on poverty.
“As we come to the midpoint of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it is clear that before the pandemic, multidimensional poverty reduction made steady progress. However, the impacts of the pandemic on areas such as education are far-reaching and can have lasting consequences,” said Human Development Report Bureau Director Pedro Conceição.
“It is imperative to make more efforts to understand the areas most negatively affected, which implies strengthening data collection and policy efforts to continue reducing poverty,” he added.
Judging from the few countries where data was only collected in 2021 or 2022 (Mexico, Madagascar, Cambodia, Peru and Nigeria), poverty may have continued to decline during the pandemic.
Cambodia, Peru and Nigeria have recorded significant reductions in poverty in the most recent periods, giving hope that further progress is possible. In Cambodia, the most encouraging case, the incidence of poverty fell from 36.7% to 16.6% and the number of poor people was halved from 5.6 million to 2.8 million, all in 7.5 years, including pandemic years (2014-2021/22).
UNDP believes that while continuing to focus on data collection, the picture needs to be broadened to include the impacts of the pandemic on children. In more than half of the countries covered by the report, no statistically significant reduction in child poverty was found, or the MPI value fell more slowly among children than among adults for at least one year. period.
According to the 2023 report, 1.1 billion people out of 6.1 billion (just over 18%) live in acute multidimensional poverty in 110 countries. Five out of six people living in poverty live in sub-Saharan Africa (534 million) and South Asia (389 million).
Nearly two-thirds of all poor people (730 million people) live in middle-income countries, making action in these countries essential to reducing global poverty. Although low-income countries represent only 10% of the population included in the MPI, it is where 35% of all poor people reside, the document points out.
Children under 18 account for half of the MPI poor (566 million). The poverty rate among children is 27.7%, while among adults it is 13.4%. Poverty mainly affects rural areas, with 84% of all poor people living in rural areas. Rural areas are poorer than urban areas in all regions of the world, the report says.
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