‘Half of all people living in poverty are minors’

MANILA, Philippines — Globally, youth are the largest poverty-stricken group, according to a new report released by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and partners.

The report estimates that half of all people living in poverty are younger than 18 years old.

The new figures in the 2018 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) released on Sept. 20 show that in 104 primarily low- and middle-income countries, 662 million children are considered poor based on multiple different indicators. In 35 of these countries, children account for at least 50 percent of the total.

The 2018 MPI, produced by UNDP and the University of Oxford’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative, provides the most comprehensive view of the many ways in which 1.3 billion people worldwide experience poverty in their daily lives.

The MPI looks beyond income to understand how people experience poverty in multiple and simultaneous ways across the three key dimensions of health, education and living standards; taking in factors such as a lack of clean water, sanitation, adequate nutrition or primary education.

According to the index, those who are deprived in at least one-third of the MPI’s components are defined as “multidimensionally poor.” The 2018 figures, closely aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), cover almost three-quarters of the world’s population.

Some 1.3 billion people live in multidimensional poverty, which is almost a quarter of the population of the 104 countries used to calculate the 2018 MPI.

Of these, 46 percent are thought to be living in severe poverty.

 “Although the level of poverty – particularly in children – is staggering so is the progress that can be made in tackling it. In India alone some 271 million have escaped multidimensional poverty in just ten years,” Achim Steiner, UNDP administrator, said.

“The Multidimensional Poverty Index gives insights that are vital for understanding the many ways in which people experience poverty, and it provides a new perspective on the scale and nature of global poverty while reminding us that eliminating it in all its forms is far from impossible,” he added.