In 2026, an estimated 10 per cent of the world’s population—some 826 million people—still live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than $3.00 a day in 2021 purchasing power parity (PPP). Since 2015, this share has fallen by only three percentage points,

The lasting imprint of the COVID-19 pandemic is now unmistakable. The poorest regions were hit hardest and have recovered most slowly: sub-Saharan Africa saw extreme poverty rise by two percentage points during the pandemic and returned to pre-pandemic levels only in 2025. Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand) followed the same trajectory.

The global outlook offers little reassurance going forward. Even setting aside the impact of the recent crisis in the Middle East, about 9 per cent of the world’s population is projected to still be in extreme poverty in 2030.

That figure, however, hides considerable regional variations. While most regions will be close to eradicating extreme poverty by 2030, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand) remain critical exceptions. With 71 per cent of the world’s extreme poor now concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, the prospects of ending extreme poverty globally depend largely on what happens there.

Having a job or business is no guarantee of escaping poverty. In 2025, 284 million workers — 7.9 per cent of the employed population — were living in extreme poverty worldwide, down from 11 per cent in 2015. Progress, however, has been far from uniform. In sub-Saharan Africa and the least developed countries (LDCs), working poverty stood at around 40 per cent, around two percentage points lower than a decade earlier. In landlocked developing countries (LLDCs) and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand), nearly one in three employed persons lived in extreme poverty. By contrast, Central and Southern Asia saw the sharpest improvement, with the working poverty rate falling from 15.9 per cent in 2015 to 5.2 per cent in 2025.

The gap is generational. Young people aged 15 to 24 are more than twice as likely as adults to be working poor, and in sub-Saharan Africa, nearly half of employed youth live in working poverty, with similar rates in LDCs and LLDCs.

Marking a historic first, more than half the global population — 52.4 per cent — was covered by at least one social protection benefit in 2023, up from 42.8 per cent in 2015. Despite this progress, some 3.8 billion people remained without any form of social protection.

Coverage varies markedly across groups. Only 28.2 per cent of children received a family benefit, 36.4 per cent of mothers with newborns received maternity benefits, 38.9 per cent of persons with severe disabilities received disability benefits, and 37.4 per cent of workers were covered by employment injury protection. The sharpest contrast is between old-age and unemployment coverage: old-age pensions reached 79.6 per cent of people above retirement age (up 5.5 percentage points since 2015), while unemployment protection covered just 16.7 per cent of unemployed persons—an increase of only 1.3 percentage points over nearly a decade. Social assistance—non-contributory, tax-financed benefits provided by the government to individuals or households in need— expanded most rapidly, covering 37.3 per cent of vulnerable persons, up 10.6 percentage points since 2015.

Between 2023 and 2024, official development assistance (ODA) grants focused on poverty reduction fell by 8.7 per cent to $19.1 billion—returning to 2015 levels and erasing nearly a decade of progress. The decline was driven by a $1.5 billion drop in basic health aid, which retreated to pre-pandemic levels after a sharp peak during COVID-19. Development grants also fell for food assistance (11 per cent, to $1.0 billion), education (9 per cent, to $3.1 billion) and other social infrastructure (9 per cent, to $900 million). Only water supply and sanitation grants grew, rising 7 per cent to $3.4 billion. Total ODA grants for poverty reduction represented just 0.02 per cent of donor countries’ gross national income (GNI) in 2024, a share that has held flat since 2015.