The World Bank Group has announced in a new report, that global extreme poverty will decrease to a single digit by the end of this year.
The group said nearly one-third of the world’s population was living below the poverty line just 25 years ago. Despite the increase of the population, the organization maintains that there are now half as many people living in extreme poverty compared to the year 1990.
This development has been attributed to investments in education, health care and social services, as well as global economic trends.
In 2005, the World Bank defined extreme poverty as living on less than $1.25 a day. More than 1.3 billion people live below this figure, representing 12.7%, according to 2012 figures released by the World Bank.
But researchers for the organization say the $1.25 has been revised to $1.90. This new figure reflects the general decrease in the purchasing power of the United States Dollar, relative to the currencies of most developing countries. Basically, $1.90 buys today what $1.25 bought in 2005.
Therefore, based on the new measure, the World Bank estimates that extreme poverty around the world will fall from the 12.7% (approximately 902 million people) in 2012, to 9.6% (702 million people) by the end of this year.
World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, said in a statement published by the Take Part ,“This is the best story in the world today. These projections show us that we are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty. This new forecast of poverty falling into the single digits should give us new momentum and help us focus even more clearly on the most effective strategies to end extreme poverty.”
However, this optimism by the World Bank’s president, has been received with skepticism by observers in sub-Sahara Africa. While poverty rates are declining worldwide, in areas like sub-Saharan Africa—where countries are entrenched in conflicts, overly dependent on commodity exports and have a constant population increase—it appears the new figures given are not reflecting the situation in the region.
Even according to the World Bank’s own figures, 95% of the world’s poverty is concentrated in three regions, East Asia and the Pacific, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. World Bank researchers have said in the past that the composition of poverty across these three regions has shifted dramatically.
In 1990, 50% of the world’s poor lived in East Asia, while 15% lived in sub-Saharan Africa. Today, those figures have dramatically reversed. 42.7% of the world’s poor now live in sub-Sahara Africa. Half of the world’s extremely impoverished people are in sub-Saharan Africa, not unlike East Asia some 25 years ago.
Even the senior adviser for the World Bank’s Development Research Group, Francisco Ferreira, admits on Inverse.com that there is a huge problem with sub-Saharan economies, as the rate at which they are falling is a cause for concern.
“The big challenge for 2030 is that remaining poverty will really be concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where the incidents of poverty are still expected to be around 20% in fragile states that are still relying on commodity exports. There is some evidence that that commodity super cycle has come to an end. There’s this kind of concentration, these pockets of hard-to-reach poverty that will be left in certain places. There is an African face to poverty in 2030,” he said.
At the United Nations General Assembly earlier this year, World Leaders adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, a number of goals which are aimed at wiping out extreme poverty by 2030. Many critics have said the goals look very unlikely, especially given the current realities in areas like sub-Sahara Africa.
Even President Kim himself was quoted as saying, “It will be extraordinarily hard, especially in a period of slower global growth, volatile financial markets, conflicts, high youth unemployment, and the growing impact of climate change.”
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