Key findings:

Across 109 countries 1.3 billion people— 21.7 per-cent—live in acute multidimensional poverty.

Who are the 1.3 billion multidimensionally poor people, and where do they live?

• About half (644 million) are children under age 18. One in three children is multidimensionally poor compared with one in six adults.
• Nearly 85 percent live in Sub-Saharan Africa (556 million) or South Asia (532 million).
• Roughly, 84 percent (1.1 billion) live in rural areas, and 16 percent (about 209 million) live in urban areas.
• More than 67 percent live in middle-income countries, where the incidence ranges from 0.1 percent to 66.8 percent nationally and from 0.0 percent to 89.5 percent subnationally.

What deprivations do the 1.3 billion multidimensionally poor people face?

• 481 million live with an out-of-school child.
• 550 million lack at least seven of eight assets (radio, television, telephone, computer, animal cart, bicycle, motorbike or refrigerator) and do not have a car.
• 568 million lack improved drinking water within a 30-minute roundtrip walk.
• 635 million live in households in which no member has completed at least six years of schooling.
• 678 million lack electricity.
• 788 million live in a household with at least one undernourished person.
• 1 billion each are exposed to solid cooking fuels, inadequate sanitation and substandard housing.

As a health emergency that has cost millions of lives, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruption around the world. Moreover, it entails profound and regressive multidimensional costs for the poorest countries, particularly those in Sub-Saharan Africa. The severity of the crisis in these countries has been underestimated because limited direct mortality has kept them outside the international spotlight. High multidimensional poverty appears to be, on average, amplifying the adverse pandemic-related shocks in education and employment and limiting the space for emergency protection programmes. Despite local and global efforts, the pandemic and its socio-economic implications will affect humans, economies and societies for years.

Multidimensional poverty and ethnicity, race and caste

• Almost 690 million (28.2 percent) of the 2.4 billion people in the 41 countries with ethnicity, race and caste data live in multidimensional poverty.
• In each of the nine poorest ethnic groups—all in Burkina Faso and Chad—more than 90 percent of the population is multidimensionally poor.
• The difference in the percentage of people identified as multidimensionally poor between the poorest ethnic group and the least poor group ranges from less than 1 percentage point in Cuba, Kazakhstan, and Trinidad and Tobago to more than 70 percentage points in Gabon and Nigeria.
• Indigenous peoples are among the poorest in all Latin American countries covered. In the Plurinational State of Bolivia indigenous communities account for about 44 percent of the population but 75 percent of multidimensionally poor people.
• In Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Mongolia and Viet Nam ethnic minorities are poorer than majority groups.
• The two poorest ethnic groups in Gambia—the Wollof and the Sarahule—have roughly the same MPI value but different compositions of multi-dimensional poverty.
• In India five out of six multidimensionally poor people are from lower tribes or castes. The Scheduled Tribe group accounts for 9.4 percent of the population and is the poorest, with 65 million of the 129 million people living in multidimensional poverty

Multidimensional poverty through a gendered and intrahousehold lens

• Two-thirds of multidimensionally poor people—836 million—live in households in which no girl or woman has completed at least six years of schooling.
• The percentage of multidimensionally poor people living in households in which no girl or woman has completed at least six years of schooling ranges from 12.8 percent in Europe and Central Asia to 70.5 percent in the Arab States.
• One-sixth of all multidimensionally poor people (215 million) live in households in which at least one boy or man has completed at least six years of schooling but no girl or woman has.
• One in six multidimensionally poor people live in female-headed households.
• In 14 countries, home to 1.8 billion people, female-headed households have, on average, a larger MPI value than male-headed households.
• The incidence of multidimensional poverty is positively associated with the rate of intimate partner violence against women and girls.