GLOBAL EXTREME POVERTY TO RISE --- WB

The World Bank Group's goal to end poverty has suffered its worst setback with COVID-19.

Before COVID-19, the quest to end poverty has been steadily gaining ground but with the coronavirus' pernicious effect, global extreme poverty is expected to rise in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years, the World Bank said.

Aside from this, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic compounds the forces of conflict and climate change, which were already slowing poverty reduction progress.

The global extreme poverty rate fell to 9.2 percent in 2017, from 10.1 percent in 2015. That is equivalent to 689 million people living on less than $1.90 a day.

At higher poverty lines, 24.1 percent of the world lived on less than $3.20 a day and 43.6 percent on less than $5.50 a day in 2017, according to the WB.

In 2018, four out of five people below the international poverty line lived in rural areas.

• Half of the poor are children. Women represent a majority of the poor in most regions and among some age groups. About 70 percent of the global poor aged 15 and over have no schooling or only some basic education.

• Almost half of poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa live in just five countries: Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Madagascar.

• More than 40 percent of the global poor live in economies affected by fragility, conflict and violence, and that number is expected to rise to 67 percent in the next decade. Those economies have just 10 percent of the world’s population.

• About 132 million of the global poor live in areas with high flood risk.

But many people who had barely escaped extreme poverty could be forced back into it by the convergence of COVID-19, conflict, and climate change.

A “nowcast” (preliminary estimate) for 2020, incorporating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, projects that an additional 88 million to 115 million people will be pushed into extreme poverty, bringing the total to between 703 and 729 million, WB said.

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