Where People Live in Extreme Poverty

The place where the highest share of people continue to live in extreme poverty is Sub-Saharan Africa. As of 2019, the latest year available with the World Bank, more than a third of people in the region lived below the international poverty line (currently defined as subsisting on $2.15 per day). Some of the countries most affected by this were Madagascar, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan.

Several countries in the Americas and Asia also have a high share of people who live below the poverty line, for example Honduras, Bangladesh and India, where extreme poverty affected between 10 percent and 13.5 percent of people as of the latest available data. In Haiti, this number stood even higher at 29.2 percent when data was last released in 2012.

Overall, in the Middle East and North Africa as well as in South Asia, the share of the population in extreme poverty had dropped under 10 percent previous to the Covid-19 pandemic. In Latin America and the Caribbean, it stood even lower at 4.7 percent as of 2021.