The 2024 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report was jointly published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).
Key points
- This 2024 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report overlays violent conflict data with multidimensional poverty data to better understand their interlinkages across countries and over time.
- It presents MPI data from 112 countries covering 1,359 subnational regions. The results show that 1.1 billion of 6.3 billion people live in acute multidimensional poverty, over half of them children.
- The five countries with the largest number of people living in poverty are India (234 million), which is medium HDI, and Pakistan (93 million), Ethiopia (86 million), Nigeria (74 million) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (66 million), all low HDI.
- Together, these five countries account for nearly half (48.1 percent) of the 1.1 billion poor people.
- 83.7 percent of poor people live in rural areas. Across all world regions people in rural areas are poorer than people in urban areas.
- 83.2 percent of the world’s 1.1 billion multidimensionally poor people live in Sub- Saharan Africa and South Asia. Sub- Saharan Africa has 553 million people living in poverty, and South Asia, 402 million.
- The report says that a staggering 455 million of the world’s poor live in countries exposed to violent conflict, hindering and even reversing hard-won progress to reduce poverty. Poverty reduction tends to be the slowest in countries most affected by conflict – where poverty is often the highest.
- Since its inception in 2010, the global MPI has been instrumental as an analytical tool to identify the most vulnerable people.
- The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is published by the UNDP’s Human Development Report Office and tracks deprivation across three dimensions and 10 indicators: health (child mortality, nutrition), education (years of schooling, enrollment), and living standards (water, sanitation, electricity, cooking fuel, floor, assets).
