Headlines
Number of extremely poor continues to soar in Sub-Sahara Africa
Although globally, extreme poverty has rapidly declined, the number of people living in extreme poverty is, however, on the rise in Sub-Saharan Africa, comprising more than half of the extreme poor in 2015, a new poverty estimates by the World Bank has shown.
Forecasts also indicate that by 2030, nearly 9 in 10 extremely poor people will live in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The new poverty estimates by the World Bank suggest that the number of extremely poor people—those who live on $1.90 a day or less—has fallen from 1.9 billion in 1990 to about 736 million in 2015.
It combines Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) exchange rates for household consumption from the 2011 International Comparison Program with data from more than one thousand five hundred household surveys across 164 economies in the world, including 26 high income economies not included in PovcalNet’s geographic regions. Over two million randomly sampled households were interviewed for the 2015 estimate, representing 65 percent of the population of the whole world.
PovcalNet is the source of, and allows users to replicate, the Bank’s official global, regional and internationally comparable economy level poverty estimates published in the World Development Indicators and the Poverty and Shared Prosperity report. It also provides crucial inputs to the Poverty and Equity Data Portal. If you would like to duplicate the World Bank’s regional poverty estimates please click the first button; or go to the second button to form your own group of economies. PovcalNet uses unit-record data whenever possible. For other cases, grouped distributions are used. New survey data become available to us on a continuous basis and these will be added to PovcalNet in regular updates.