“UNICEF’s latest State of the World’s Children report finds that the share of children living in “severe deprivation” fell from 65.1 percent to 40.6 percent between 2000 and 2023. Note that this measure is not based on family income, but instead on indicators related to education, health, housing, nutrition, sanitation, and water,” reports The Doomslayer.
Still, many children live in poverty, UNICEF says: “Sanitation is the most widespread severe deprivation, with 65 per cent of children lacking access to a toilet in low-income countries, 26 per cent in lower-middle income countries, and 11 per cent in upper-middle income countries.” “Children are more than twice as likely as adults to live in extreme monetary poverty.”
UNICEF’s definition of “severe deprivation” classifies kids as deprived even if they wouldn’t be considered extremely poor under definitions of poverty used by other international organizations.
Family incomes have improved, though. “The number of children living in extreme poverty fell to a record low of 412 million in 2024, down from 507 million a decade earlier,” reports The Doomslayer. The percentage of children living in poverty has never been lower in human history.
The World Bank explains:
In 2024, an estimated 412 million children aged 17 or younger were residing in households living on less than $3 a day, the extreme poverty line used for low-income countries.
Globally, child poverty has been on a steady, if slow, decline since 2014, when an estimated 507 million children lived in extreme poverty. However, the pace of poverty reduction among children has been slower compared to the general population. Children continue to be disproportionately affected, comprising more than 50 percent of those in extreme poverty, although their share of the global population is just 30 percent.
Today, child poverty is increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa…While Sub Saharan Africa is home to about 23 percent of the world’s population of children, it is home to about three quarters (over 312 million) of all children living in extreme poverty…[But] the extreme child poverty rate is projected to have almost doubled [in the Middle East and North Africa] between 2014 and 2024, increasing from 7.2 percent to 13.3 percent.
On the other hand, hundreds of children were recently slaughtered in El Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state, where thousands of people have starved to death.
Poverty has declined rapidly in the world’s most mountainous country, Bhutan.
Poverty has declined in Latin America, except in countries ruled by socialist dictatorships.
Global life expectancy and income are at an all-time high.
Back in 1950, most of the world’s people lived in extreme poverty. Thankfully, that’s not true today.
