A decade after the United Nations adopted Sustainable Development Goal 1 (SDG 1), the promise to end extreme poverty by 2030 is progressively out of reach.
The world made historic progress between 1990 and 2015, but that momentum has slowed sharply. The latest World Bank estimates show that 824.3 million people, about 10.1% of the world’s population, were living in extreme poverty in 2024. The rate is projected to fall only marginally to 9.8% in 2026. At the current trajectory, the UN estimates that around 9% of the world’s population will still live in extreme poverty in 2030.
The problem is no longer simply a lack of progress. It is that the remaining poverty is increasingly concentrated in countries and communities facing the greatest economic, climate and political vulnerabilities.
Understanding this shift requires looking back at the trajectory of global poverty reduction over the past few decades. The slowdown began before the pandemic. Between 1990 and 2015, global extreme poverty declined by roughly one percentage point a year, by 2015–2017, the pace had fallen to less than half a percentage point annually.
COVID-19 then delivered the first global increase in extreme poverty in more than two decades, wiping out years of progress. The pandemic exposed how vulnerable low-income households were to economic disruption, particularly where social protection systems were weak. The recovery has been uneven, leaving poverty rates in many low-income countries above their pre-pandemic levels.
The pandemic was followed by a wider combination of inflation, weak growth, debt pressures, supply disruptions and armed conflict.
The result is what the World Bank describes as a polycrisis, multiple shocks reinforcing one another and making poverty reduction more difficult. Conflict has been particularly damaging, as poverty increasingly becomes concentrated in fragile and conflict-affected settings. The World Bank estimates that by 2030, roughly four in five people living in extreme poverty will be in Sub-Saharan Africa or fragile and conflict-affected countries.
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