Center for Social Innovation

Aid is increasingly focused on the “bottom billion” in extremely poor, mostly African, nations. But according to a new analysis, most of the world’s poor no longer live in these countries.

The 960 million poorest people on the planet—or three quarters of the 1.3 billion who make less than $1.25 per day—are now in middle-income countries, says Andy Sumner of the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, United Kingdom. What happened is that “most of the world’s poor live in a relatively small number of countries, countries like India and Nigeria, which have become richer in average terms” and recently graduated from low-income to middle-income status, Sumner says. “But at the same time, poverty doesn’t seem to have fallen much.” The ... Read more