Fact of the week

14.1%: The proportion of people living on less than $1 a day in Eastern Asia in 2002, down from 33.0% in 1990

Millennium Development Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty & hunger   
Target:  Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day.

In 1990, more than 1.2 billion people – 28 per cent of the developing world’s population – lived in extreme poverty. By 2002, the proportion decreased to 19 per cent. During that period, rates of extreme poverty fell rapidly in much of Asia, where the number of people living on less than $1 a day dropped by nearly a quarter of a billion people. Progress was not so rapid in Latin America and the Caribbean, which now has a larger share of people living in poverty than South-Eastern Asia and Oceania. Poverty rates in Western Asia and Northern Africa remained almost unchanged between 1990 and 2002 and increased in the transition economies of South-Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). These two regions had previously nearly eradicated the worst forms of poverty, and recent survey data suggest that their poverty rates are again dropping. In sub-Saharan Africa, although the poverty rate declined marginally, the number of people living in extreme poverty increased by 140 million. Many sub-Saharan countries are now showing potential for long-term growth that could bring up standards of living.

Source: UN DESA, The Millennium Development Goals Report 2006, New York, June 2006.