Extreme poverty is the most severe type of poverty, defined by the United Nations (UN) as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services".United Nations. "Report of the World Summit for Social Development", 6–12 March 1995. (archived from the original on 4 July 2019) Historically, other definitions have been proposed within the United Nations.
Extreme poverty mainly refers to an income below the international poverty line of $3 per day in 2025 ($ in dollars), set by the World Bank. This is the equivalent of $1.00 a day in 1985 US prices, hence the widely used expression "living on less than a dollar a day". The vast majority of those in extreme poverty reside in Sub-Saharan Africa. As of 2026, it is estimated that the country with the most people living in extreme poverty is the DRC, at 76.2 million.
In the past, the vast majority of the world population lived in conditions of extreme poverty. The percentage of the global population living in absolute poverty fell from over 80% in 1800 to around 10% by 2025. According to UN estimates, roughly 831 million people or 10% remained under those conditions. In 2000, there had been 2.23 billion people in extreme poverty. Despite the significant number of individuals still below the international poverty line, these figures represent significant progress for the international community, as they reflect a decrease of more than one billion people over 25 years.
The reduction of extreme poverty and hunger was the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG1), as set by the United Nations in 2000. Specifically, the target was to reduce the extreme poverty rate by half by 2015, a goal that was met five years ahead of schedule. In the Sustainable Development Goal 1, which succeeded the MDGs, the goal is to end extreme poverty in all its forms everywhere. With this declaration the international community, including the UN and the World Bank have adopted the target of ending extreme poverty by 2030.
Definition Previous definitions
In July 1993, Leandro Despouy, the then UN Special Raporters on extreme poverty and human rights made use of a definition he adapted from a 1987 report to the French Economic and Social CouncilJoseph Wresinski. "Grande pauvreté et precarité économique et sociale", 10–11 February 1987. by Fr. Joseph Wresinski, founder of the International Movement ATD Fourth World, distinguishing "lack of basic security" (poverty) and "chronic poverty" (extreme poverty), linking the eradication of extreme poverty by allowing people currently experiencing it a real opportunity to exercise all their human rights:
This definition was mentioned previously, in June 1989, in the preliminary report on the realization of economic, social and cultural rights by the UN Special Rapporteur Danilo Türk.Danilo Türk. "Preliminary report on the new international economic order and the promotion of human rights", 28 June 1989. It is still in use today, among others, in the current UN Guiding Principles on Extreme Poverty and Human RightsMagdalena Sepúlveda Carmona "Final draft of the guiding principles on extreme poverty and human rights", 18 July 2012. adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in September 2012.UN Human Rights Council. Resolution 21/11 dated 27 September 2012.
Consumption-based definition
Extreme poverty is defined by the international community as living below $3.00 a day, as measured in 2021 international prices (equivalent to $3.69 in 2026). This number, also known as the international poverty line, is periodically updated to account for inflation and differences in the cost of living;Sala-i-Martin, Xavier. "The world distribution of income: falling poverty and convergence period". The Quarterly Journal of Economics 121.2 (2006): 351–397 (370). it was originally defined at $1.00 a day in 1996. The updates are made according to new price data to portray the costs of basic food, health services, clothing, and shelter around the world as accurately as possible. The latest revision was made in 2025 when the World Bank increased the line to international-$3.00.
Because many of the world's poorest people do not have a monetary income, the poverty measurement is based on the monetary value of a person's consumption. Otherwise the poverty measurement would be missing the home production of subsistence farmers that consume largely their own production.
Alternative definitions
The $3/day extreme poverty line remains the most widely used metric as it highlights the reality of those in the most severe conditions. Although widely used by most international organizations, it has come under scrutiny due to a variety of factors. For example, it does not account for how far below the line people are, referred to as the depth of poverty. For this purpose, the same institutions publish data on the poverty gap.
The international poverty line is designed to stay constant over time, to allow comparisons between different years. It is therefore a measure of absolute poverty and is not measuring relative poverty. It is also not designed to capture how people view their own financial situation (known as the socially subjective poverty line). Moreover, the calculation of the poverty line relies on information about consumer prices to calculate purchasing power parity, which are very hard to measure and are necessarily debatable. As with all other metrics, there may also be missing data from the poorest and most fragile countries.
Several alternative instruments for measuring extreme poverty have been suggested which incorporate other factors such as malnutrition and lack of access to a basic education. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), based on the Alkire–Foster Method, is published by the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI): it measures deprivation in basic needs and can be broken down to reflect both the incidence and the intensity of poverty. For example, under conventional measures, in both Chad and Guinea-Bissau about 40% of the population is considered extremely poor, but based on the MPI, 84% of Chadians and 64% of Bissau-Guineans are in multidimensional poverty.Dan Morrell."Who Is Poor?", Harvard Magazine. January–February 2011.
The MPI is useful for development officials to determine the most likely causes of poverty within a region, using the M0 measure of the method (which is calculated by multiplying the fraction of people in poverty by the fraction of dimensions they are deprived in).OPHI."Alkire-Foster Method" , 2014. For example, in the Gaza Strip of Palestine, using the M0 measure of the Alkire–Foster method reveals that poverty in the region is primarily caused by a lack of access to electricity, lack of access to drinking water, and widespread overcrowding. In contrast, data from the Chhukha District of Bhutan reveals that income is a much larger contributor to poverty as opposed to other dimensions within the region.Sabina Alkire and James Foster."Counting and Multidimensional Poverty", International Food Policy Research Institute. However, the MPI only presents data from 105 countries, so it cannot be used for global measurements.
Share of the population living in extreme poverty
+Number of people pushed below the $3.00 ($2011 PPP) poverty line (in millions) +Region19901995200020052010201520202025North America1.311.671.902.793.203.660.943.80Latin America & Caribbean91.3689.1894.1679.0149.7336.4036.4129.45Middle East & North Africa131.24111.21117.91104.4283.3578.4791.1797.19South Asia503.32529.24570.31583.76439.16263.3152.2152.74East Asia & Pacific1217.271071.16958.72618.98417.33141.0764.6244.90Europe & Central Asia33.9862.4765.7143.9733.4210.827.624.72Sub-Saharan Africa320.72384.58425.50432.56442.84446.23542.35598.08Total2,3002,2502,2301,8701,4701,000895831
Current trends Getting to zero
Using the World Bank definition of $3/day, , roughly 613 million people remained in extreme poverty (or roughly 1 in 13 people worldwide). Nearly a quarter of them live in Nigeria and The Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a steady decline in both the worldwide poverty rate and the total number of extreme poor. In 1990, the percentage of the global population living in extreme poverty was 43%, but in 2015, that percentage had dropped down to 13.4%. This thirding of the extreme poverty rate falls in line with the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG1) proposed by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who called on the international community at the turn of the century to reduce the percentage of people in extreme poverty by half by 2015.
This reduction in extreme poverty took place most notably in China, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan. These five countries accounted for the alleviation of 1.5 billion people out of extreme poverty between 1990 and 2025, which would make the number of people in extreme poverty at around 820 million, less than the current amount of 831. This statistical oddity can be explained by the fact that the number of people living in extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa rose from 321 million to 598 million over the same period. However, there have been many positive signs for extensive, global poverty reduction as well. Since 1990, the total number of people in extreme poverty has declined by an average of 42 million per year. Moreover, in 2005, for the first time in recorded history, poverty rates began to fall in every region of the world, including Africa.
As aforementioned, the number of people living in extreme poverty has reduced from 2.3 billion to 831 million over the span of the last decades. If we remain on our current trajectory, many economists predict we will still have 793 million people in poverty. Global zero entails a world in which fewer than 3% of the global population lives in extreme poverty (projected under most optimistic scenarios to be fewer than 200 million people). This zero figure is set at 3% in recognition of the fact that some amount of frictional (temporary) poverty will continue to exist, whether it is caused by political conflict or unexpected economic fluctuations, at least for the foreseeable future.World Bank."Prosperity for All: Ending Extreme Poverty", Spring 2014. However, the Brookings Institution notes that any projection about poverty more than a few years into the future runs the risk of being highly uncertain. This is because changes in consumption and distribution throughout the developing world over the next two decades could result in monumental shifts in global poverty, for better or worse.Laurence Chandy et al. "The Final Countdown: Prospects for Ending Extreme Poverty". . Brookings Institution. April 2013.
More recent analyses in 2022 on real wages have questioned whether extreme poverty was a "natural" condition of humanity and decreased with the rise of capitalism.
Exacerbating factors
There are a variety of factors that may reinforce or instigate the existence of extreme poverty, such as weak institutions, cycles of violence and a low level of growth. Recent World Bank research shows that some countries can get caught in a "fragility trap", in which self-reinforcing factors prevent the poorest nations from emerging from low-level equilibrium in the long run.World Bank. "Stop Conflict, Reduce Fragility and End Poverty: Doing Things Differently in Fragile and Conflict-affected Situations". 2013. Moreover, most of the reduction in extreme poverty over the past twenty years has taken place in countries that have not experienced a civil conflict or have had governing institutions with a strong capacity to actually govern. Thus, to end extreme poverty, it is also important to focus on the interrelated problems of fragility and conflict.