Surviving on pennies: we must help the world's most deprived.

• Author: Ahmed, Akhter

Seven years ago, the international community made a commitment to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger between 1990 and 2015. Now at the halfway point between its declaration and the target deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, it is obvious the world has made significant progress. However, though poverty and malnutrition rates are declining, it is less clear whether efforts are reaching the poorest and most hungry people--the world's most deprived. Currently, 1 billion people worldwide live on less than one dollar a day, the threshold defined by the international community as constituting extreme poverty. Yet, this number masks a multitude of people living in varying degrees of poverty, some even more desperately poor than others.

In a new report, The World's Most Deprived: Characteristics and Causes of Extreme Poverty and Hunger, published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the population living on less than $1 a day is further divided into three categories, according to the depth of poverty--an analysis that better answers the question of whether the very poorest are being reached. The report is the first of its kind to use household poverty data from 1990 to 2004 to look below the dollar-a-day poverty line and examine who the poorest people are, where they live and how they have fared over time. It was conducted as part of an ongoing consultation process undertaken by IFPRI to see what policies, programmes and implementation strategies are needed for development efforts to be more effective at reaching the very poorest. Three categories of poverty in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa were examined in the study: subjacent poor (those living on between $0.75 and $1 a day), medial poor (those living on between $0.50 and $0.75 a day) and ultra poor (those living on less than $0.50 a day).*

Our analysis found that as many as 162 million people survive on less than $0.50 a day. If concentrated in a single nation, these people would comprise the world's seventh most populous country.

To determine how the ultra poor are faring, we calculated the amount by which poverty in each group would have been reduced if everyone's income had grown by the same amount between 1990 and 2004. We then compared this "equal growth scenario" with the amount of poverty reduction that actually took place during this period. We found that progress against poverty has...