Some 41.7 million people in Bangladesh live in extreme poverty with 6.5 per cent of them in critical condition, says a latest UN agency report that also paints grim pictures for two regions.
In South Asia, 272 million poor people live in households with at least one undernourished person, and Sub-Saharan Africa has 256 million in such a miasma, according to the update of the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI).
The report has been jointly published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) based at the University of Oxford.
This year's report features original statistical research on multidimensional poverty for 112 countries and 6.3 billion people, as well as fine-grained analysis of the relationship between conflict and poverty. It includes new survey data for 20 countries.
The 2024 edition of the MPI report states that 1.1 billion people live in acute poverty worldwide, with 40 percent living in countries experiencing war, fragility and/or low peacefulness according to at least one of the three widely used datasets of conflict settings.
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, it says.
Owing to lack of data, the global MPI is measured over a ten-year period (2012-2023) to create a comparable index of global levels and trends.
The challenges of gathering data in conflict-affected countries likely lead to an underestimation of multidimensional poverty in these countries, with available data still underscoring the catastrophic effect of conflict on poverty reduction.
In conflict-affected countries, over one in four poor people lacks access to electricity, compared to just over one in twenty in more stable regions.
The analysis finds that deprivations are markedly more severe in nutrition, access to electricity, and access to water and sanitation for the poor in conflict settings relative to the poor in more peaceful settings.
"Poverty reduction tends to be the slowest in countries most affected by conflict - where poverty is often the highest."
Sabina Alkire, Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, says, "This study provides the first measured global analysis at this scale examining how in conflict settings multidimensionally poor people are affected."
Since its inception in 2010, the global MPI has been instrumental as an analytical tool to identify the most vulnerable people - the poorest among the poor, revealing poverty patterns within countries and over time, enabling policymakers to target resources and design policies more effectively.
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