Himal Press 
KATHMANDU: A staggering 455 million of the world’s poor live in countries exposed to violent conflict, the latest update of the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) released on Thursday states.
According to the 2024 edition of the MPI, 1.1 billion people live in acute poverty worldwide, with 40% living in countries experiencing war, fragility and/or low peacefulness.
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 found 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.
“Conflicts have intensified and multiplied in recent years, reaching new highs in casualties, displacing record millions of people, and causing widespread disruption to lives and livelihoods,” said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator. “Our new research shows that of the 1.1 billion people living in multidimensional poverty, almost half a billion live in countries exposed to violent conflict. We must accelerate action to support them. We need resources and access for specialized development and early recovery interventions to help break the cycle of poverty and crisis.”
Poverty reduction tends to be the slowest in countries most affected by conflict – where poverty is often the highest. The report includes an in-depth case study on Afghanistan, where 5.3 million more people fell into multidimensional poverty during the turbulent period 2015/16–2022/23. In 2022/23, nearly two-thirds of Afghans were poor.
According to the MPI report, over half of the 1.1 billion poor people are children under the age of 18 (584 million). Globally, 27.9% of children live in poverty, compared with 13.5% of adults. Likewise, large proportions of the 1.1 billion poor people lack adequate sanitation (828 million), housing (886 million) or cooking fuel (998 million).
Similarly, well over half of the 1.1 billion poor people live with a person who is undernourished in their household (637 million). In South Asia, 272 million poor people live in households with at least one undernourished person.
