Wars, debt and climate crisis stall anti-poverty fight-report

Wars, debt, the climate crisis and the pandemic have combined to halt progress in the fight against poverty, the World Bank said yesterday.

- Larry Elliott

The Washington-based institution said on current trends it would take more than three decades to lift the nearly 700 million people living on less than $2.15 (£1.64) a day above the widely accepted definition of extreme poverty.

In its report Poverty, Prosperity and Planet, the World Bank said the setbacks of recent years had meant the UN goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030 was already impossible to hit.

Largely because of rapid growth in China, the global poverty rate fell from 38% in 1990 to 8.5% in 2024, but the rate of progress has come to a halt since 2019, and is expected to decline only modestly, to 7.3%, by 2030.

Extreme poverty remained concentrated in countries that had historically low levels of economic growth and high levels of fragility, many of which were in sub-Saharan Africa, the report said.