World Bank highlights new ways to measure and address poverty

The World Bank’s 2018 Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report explores how poverty is changing and introduces new ways to monitor our progress toward ending it. In order to see a more complete picture of poverty, the World Bank is adding new ways to look at it, a concept inspired by the recommendations from the Atkinson Commission on Global Poverty.

According to the World Bank, the Poverty and Shared Prosperity series provides a global audience with the latest and most accurate estimates on trends in global poverty and shared prosperity. “Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle”, the specific 2018 report, presents a new measure of societal poverty and investigates differences in poverty within households, including by age and gender.

The UN reported that 783 million people live below the international poverty line of US$1.90 a day and most of the people living below the poverty line live to two regions – Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the UN’s first International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. In addition, this year marks the 70th anniversary of the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and many stress the importance of understanding the relationship between extreme poverty and human rights.

In a message commemorating the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said:

“Let us remember that ending poverty is not a matter of charity but a question of justice. On this International day for the Eradication of Poverty let us commit to uphold the core pledge of the 2030 Agenda to leave no one behind.”

Eradicating poverty in all of its forms is the focus of the UN’s first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), “No Poverty”. Although in recent years progress in reducing extreme poverty has been steady, not all countries have experienced this progress and general progress has begun to slow down. The World Bank is hopeful that the new metrics for measuring poverty outlined in their report will help the world achieve the goals outlined in SDG 1 by 2030.

The AIDF Global Summit will return to Washington D.C, in 2019.

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Photo Credit: WFP/Jonathan Dumont