International Day for the Eradication of Poverty | United Nations

International Day for the Eradication of Poverty | United Nations

• The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to have pushed between 143 and 163 million people into poverty in 2021.
• The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have increased poverty by 8.1% in 2020 relative to 2019 (from 8.4% to 9.1%).
• The number of people living under the international poverty lines for lower and upper middle-income countries is projected to have increased in the poverty rate of 2.3 percentage points.
• Almost half of the projected new poor will be in South Asia, and more than a third in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• In the Middle East and North Africa, extreme poverty rates nearly doubled between 2015 and 2018, from 3.8 percent to 7.2 percent, spurred by the conflicts in the Syrian Arab Republic and the Republic of Yemen.
• Current projections indicate that shared prosperity will have dropped sharply in nearly all economies in 2020–21, as the pandemic’s economic burden is felt across the entire income distribution.
• COVID-19 has already been the worst reversal on the path towards the goal of global poverty reduction in last three decades.