According to the Human Development Report 2014, approximately 842 million individuals
worldwide suffer from chronic hunger and around 1.2 billion people live below the international
poverty line of $1.25 a day (UNDP 2014). From these two numbers alone, it is obvious that –
despite major successes over the last two decades – poverty reduction will continue to be one of
the most important challenges for humanity in the 21st century.
A common and straightforward way to approach the task of poverty reduction is to ask two basic
questions: who are the poor and where do they live? Starting with the second question, one can use
numbers from PovCalNet, the World Bank’s online poverty analysis tool (World Bank 2014), to
illustrate the regional pattern of poverty. Applying the $1.25 international poverty line1
, poverty is
in absolute terms mainly concentrated in three regions: South Asia (approximately 507 million
poor individuals), Sub-Saharan Africa (414 million), and East Asia and the Pacific (251 million).
However, this picture changes considerably when pursuing a relative approach such as the
poverty headcount ratio. Accordingly, poverty incidence is relatively highest in Sub-Saharan
Africa with approximately 48 percent of the population living on less than $1.25 a day followed
by South Asia (31 percent) and East Asia and the Pacific (12 percent). Looking at time trends for
this indicator further reveals that while all three regions started from relatively similar levels in the
year 19902
, East Asia and the Pacific as well as South Asia were considerably more successful in
reducing the poverty headcount ratio (declines of roughly 44 and 23 percentage points,
respectively), while it decreased only slightly in Sub-Saharan Africa (by approximately 8
percentage points). Thus, one can expect that the challenge of fighting extreme poverty will
mainly be centered in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa over the next few decades