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Dashboard map for 2022 SDG Index Goal #1 ratings. Data source: sdgindex.org

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Poverty headcount ratio at $1.90/day (%)

The definition of extreme poverty is an international poverty line, as deemed by the World Bank. The World Bank is an international financial institution within the UN System, with the task to provide loans to developing countries with the goal of poverty eradication. The World Bank measures the international poverty line as living on $US1.90 a day or less, which is less than enough to meet the basic needs of safe drinking water, food at or below subsistence, and access to health and education.

Approximately 740 million people met the definition of living in extreme poverty upon the adoption of the SDGs in 2015, the overwhelming majority living in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Before the industrial era, beginning in the middle of the 19th century, close to all the human population lived in a state of extreme poverty. Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a steady decrease in the number of people living in extreme poverty, as well as a decrease in the percentage of extreme poverty for the global population.

One of the key reasons for this encouraging drop in extreme poverty rates was the power of the Millennium Development Goals. The sister goal of SDG #1 was MDG #1, to halve extreme poverty levels by 2015, again using the international poverty line measure. The world met MDG #1 five years before its due date in 2010, due to the astounding growth rates of China in the period of the MDGs between 2000 and 2015. This meant MDG #1 saw a billion people lifted from extreme poverty compared to 1990, when almost half the population of developing countries lived under the international poverty line. Yet the three-quarters of a billion still left behind at the end of the MDG period in 2015 is an enormous number of people continuing to live in destitution and penury.

How to measure this Goal’s target to eradicate extreme poverty - those living under $1.90 a day - by 2030? The first indicator in use by the SDG Index is the poverty headcount ratio at $1.90/day.

As of June 2022, 682,614,000 people lived in extreme poverty, with a rate of one person per second escaping extreme poverty, an estimated metric you can view in real-time at the World Poverty Clock website. Yet the target rate to be met for those escaping poverty to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030 is 2.5 people per second. In total, this means the world is off-track by 254,758,130 people. Yet, as some escape poverty, others enter it, with the COVID-19 pandemic impacting progress on this target - though there were signs of slowing progress even before, compounded by conflict and climate change.

In 2015, the world’s extreme poverty rate was 10%, dropping to a low of 8.3% in 2019, then back up to 9.2% in 2020, equated with throwing up to 93 million people back into extreme poverty. This means the global extreme poverty rate rose in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years. The above trend projects 262 million people would still be living in extreme poverty in 2030, missing the extreme poverty eradication target - unless we instead accelerate our efforts between now and 2030.

It’s difficult, verging on impossible, to lift oneself from such an extreme poverty trap. Professor Jeffrey Sachs, co-author of the SDG Index, explains why in his magisterial book, The End of Poverty, using the analogy of the ladder of development. The End of Poverty outlines how we can end extreme poverty as though it were procedural, illuminating how achievable and within reach it is.

Those living in extreme poverty live hand-to-mouth, day-to-day. As such, they fail to produce a surplus e.g., from a crop’s harvest for smallholder farmers, thus without anything to sell to the market for a profit. Due to a high proportion of citizens living by such means in a country, a tax base to draw revenues from is missing. Thus, the government is missing the means to provide healthcare, education, or for any services to increase well-being and relieve extreme poverty. The least developed countries need aid to allow them to get their hand on the bottom rung of the development ladder. Then they have the means to lift themselves out of poverty. Without aid, this cycle will proceed mercilessly, compounded by climate change, disease, famine, demography, etc. The aim of development aid is to improve the economic and social development of humans living in countries which have yet to industrialise and are considered ‘developing’ in the parlance of the field of international development.

Aid has been chronically below the amount promised by developed countries to their developing counterparts for a half-century. Thus, the first task of the reader in high-income countries is to act on behalf of the 682 million living in extreme poverty.

The measure of aid used by the high-income OECD countries is known as ‘official development assistance’ (ODA), a concept defined in 1969 by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD. The DAC consists of 30 OECD members, making up the largest aid donors, as a forum to discuss aid and poverty reduction efforts.

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Map of OECD DAC members

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The predominant means of measuring donor amounts is as a percentage of the donor country's gross national income (GNI), a concept like GDP (gross domestic product). Whereas GDP is the value of all goods and services produced in a period, by contrast GNI includes the economic output of foreign residents of the country. The OECD DAC has an official List of ODA Recipients, all the developing countries and territories eligible to receive ODA. Included are dollar flows made via so-called ‘multilateral institutions’ e.g., the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and UN agencies like UNICEF and the WHO. To count as ODA, donor flows must come from government agencies, and the aim of the flows must be economic development and the welfare of developing countries. They must either be free of the obligation to be repaid, or otherwise loans with much more generous repayment terms than available in the commercial market.

The spending counted toward poverty reduction for ODA includes food a