811 million people remain in extreme poverty, a figure unchanged since the pandemic

The World Bank’s “Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet 2026” report, picked up on October 26 by AgenSIR, estimates that around 811 million people are currently living in extreme poverty, with less than $3 a day available to them. The figure corresponds to one in ten people worldwide.

The point the report emphasizes most strongly is not the figure itself, but its stagnation: the number of people in extreme poverty has remained substantially unchanged since the pandemic. This is therefore not an isolated episode, but an indicator that has for years failed to decline significantly, despite declared efforts at the international level to reduce it.

The World Bank adds an element that qualifies the aggregate figure: more than half of people in extreme poverty live in just nine economies. This geographic concentration is set to increase, according to the report’s projections: by 2030, 87 percent of the poorest should be found in Sub-Saharan Africa or in contexts defined as fragile. This is an interpretive limitation that the report itself places before the reader: the global average conceals an increasingly unbalanced distribution, and reading only the overall figure risks flattening enormous differences between regions.

On the question of causes and possible solutions, the report identifies the creation of more and better-quality jobs as the main lever for reversing the trend, rather than direct assistance tools.

The picture emerging from this 2026 report is therefore that of an indicator stuck for several years at a threshold of one in ten of the world’s population, with growing geographic concentration toward Sub-Saharan Africa by the end of the decade.