The number of people living in extreme poverty is projected to increase

[Tristan Katz]

Yesterday Our World in Data published this new article. It’s worth reading, but the key takeaway is this: due to population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, and a lack of economic growth in several countries there, the total number of people living in extreme poverty is soon going to start growing.

This has implications for cause prioritization. It used to be easy to think “over the long term, global poverty will solve itself”. This is no longer obviously the case, at least not in Sub-Saharan Africa. Effective interventions might be necessary to change this trend. This might also affect the kinds of interventions we should pursue: if poverty is largely being solved with time, then focusing on ameliorating the symptoms (i.e. diseases) makes sense. But if not, it might be more effective to focus more on systemic interventions, if there is a real chance (even if it is a small one) that they will work and reduce extreme poverty in these regions.

In any case, I think this might be worth sharing. This is anecdotal, but it seems to me that the narrative of “extreme poverty is rapidly decreasing” is widely repeated and believed. This is potentially harmful, if it leads people to neglect the problem, and worth correcting by sharing posts such as the this one by Our World in Data.

[Yarrow Bouchard 🔸]

David Nash just published a response to the Our World in Data blog post which seems like an important read.

I think the upshot is largely the same in any case: it is important to stimulate economic development in the poorest sub-Saharan African countries where GDP growth has been stagnant for a long time.

[David Mathers🔸]

I think when people say it is rapidly decreasing they may often mean that the the % of the world’s population living in extreme poverty is declining over time, rather than that the total number of people living in extreme poverty is going down?

[Yarrow Bouchard 🔸]

This is very important. Thank you for sharing. I didn’t realize the situation was this dire. I am very interested in discussing potential interventions to stimulate economic growth in the poorest countries (since that seems the main/​only way to help).

This chart from the post makes the point even more clearly:

Our World in Data explains:

What is different today is that the majority of the world’s poorest people are stuck in economies that have been stagnating for a long time. Consider the case of Madagascar. In the long run, the country has not seen any growth at all: GDP per capita in Madagascar is about the same today as it was in 1950. As a consequence, the number of people in extreme poverty increased in line with the country’s population growth.

And they continue:

The situation is similar in other countries, as the chart below shows: in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Malawi, Burundi, and the Central African Republic, more than half of the population lives in extreme poverty. As their economies have stagnated, the deep poverty that most people live in has remained largely unchanged for decades.

[Jens Nordmark]

East Africa seems to contain several exceptions to this general stagnation in SSA for the past two decades or so. Might be useful to compare and see what might be replicated elsewhere.

[Samuel Chikwe]

If only the government in sub Sahara Africa countries prioritize citizens welfare as top priority . In Nigeria my country the minimum wage basically enough to fend for yourself for a country with rich natural resources

[David Mathers🔸]

I think when people say it is rapidly decreasing they may often mean that the the % of the world’s population living in extreme poverty is declining over time, rather than that the total number of people living in extreme poverty is going down?

[Yarrow Bouchard 🔸]

Accidental duplicate comment. :)