North Africa

MAP 1.1 In 2019, countries with the highest poverty rate at the US$2.15-a-day poverty line were mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa

Poverty rate (%) < 1.0 1.0–3.0 3.1–15.0 15.1–40.0 > 40.0 No data

IBRD 46705 | AUGUST 2022

Source: World bank, Poverty and inequality Platform, https://pip.worldbank.org. Note: the map shows each economy’s poverty headcount rate at the us$2.15-a-day poverty line for 2019. economies without survey data available in the Poverty and inequality Platform are shown in gray.

FIGURE 1.3 From 1990 to 2019, poverty fell in all regions except the Middle East and North Africa

70

60

50

Percent 40

30

20

10 East Asia and Pacific Europe and Central Asia Latin America and the Caribbean Middle East and North Africa South Asia Sub-Saharan Africa Rest of the world

0 1990 1994 1998 2002 2006 2010 2014 2018

Source: World bank, Poverty and inequality Platform, https://pip.worldbank.org. Note: the figure shows poverty trends at the us$2.15-a-day poverty line, by region, 1990–2019. Poverty estimates are not reported when regional population coverage is below 50 percent within a three-year period before and after the reference year (see online annex 1A).

The regional poverty rate in Sub-Saharan Africa is lower than what was previously reported (Castaneda Aguilar et al. 2022a; World Bank 2020a). The lower rate is largely driven by adoption of the new 2017 PPPs, which reduce the regional poverty rate in 2019 by about 3 percentage points (see online annex 1B). Sub-Saharan Africa shows the largest changes in the levels of poverty when moving from the 2011 PPPs to the 2017 PPPs (Jolliffe et al. 2022).4 Nevertheless, poverty remains highly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a poverty rate that is about four times higher than that of the second-poorest region in the world, and the evidence on the pace of poverty reduction in the region is unaffected. The poverty headcount rate continues to fall, from 37 percent in 2017 to 35 percent in 2019 (figure 1.3). This masks considerable heterogeneity in poverty reduction across countries in Africa, with some countries seeing poverty increasing and others falling. However, high population growth in the region means that the number of people in poverty has increased, from 385 million to 389 million (see table 1C.1, panel c, in online annex 1C).

Sub-Saharan Africa is also the region in which the largest share of the population lives in countries in which the PPPs and consumer price indexes moved very differently between 2011 and 2017, requiring further scrutiny (box 1.1). More generally, analysis of poverty in SubSaharan Africa remains affected by issues of data availability and quality. Although new data for Nigeria and newly available data for 2018 for 10 countries in West Africa significantly improve the understanding of poverty in West Africa (Castaneda Aguilar et al. 2022a; Lain, Schoch, and Vishwanath 2022), data have become less available in other parts of the region. As a result, overall the share of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa living in a country with a survey within a three-year period declined from 79 percent in 2017 to 55 percent in 2019 (see table 1C.4 in online annex 1C).5 Ensuring timely, high-quality data collection across Africa will become increasingly important for the assessment of global extreme poverty because a larger share of the global extreme poor continues to reside in the region.

The implications of data scarcity for global poverty and monitoring progress toward the 2030 goal are severe and are a recurrent topic of discussion in this chapter and chapter 2. In addition, for better survey coverage in Sub-Saharan Africa, survey coverage in fragile and conflict-affected situations is increasingly important. Data coverage of this group improved between 2017 and 2019. In 2017, 43 percent of the population in this group lived in a country with a survey. By 2019, this share had gone up to 50 percent (see table 1C.4 in online annex 1C).

Because of missing data, a regional estimate for 2019 for the Middle East and North Africa cannot be reported. With this caveat in mind, the Middle East and North Africa is the only region where, driven mostly by the situation in fragile and conflict-affected economies, the poverty headcount rate has been increasing since 2014 (figure 1.3). The rate in the region was 7.5 percent in 2018, or three times higher (at 2.6 percent) than in 2014 (see table 1C.1, panel b, in online annex 1C). However, as noted before, these estimates are subject to a high degree of uncertainty because of lack of recent data on the Syrian Arab Republic and the Republic of Yemen.

As discussed later in the section on nowcasting, additional COVID-19–related disruptions of the household survey data collection process present a challenge in data availability everywhere. Surveys conducted during 2020 confirm that the pandemic has had an impact on data collection methods and on the definition of the household welfare measure.6 Those impacts pose an additional challenge for this report because they limit the availability of household survey data for 2020.7 Of the 169 countries with survey data used to calculate the global and regional poverty estimates presented in the report, only 20 countries so far have an official estimate for 2020 in the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP).8 By contrast, 85 countries have survey data available for 2018 and 61 for 2019. Moreover, the available surveys are not equally distributed across regions. Of the 20 available surveys for 2020, 12 are for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, six are for countries in Europe and Central Asia, and two more surveys are available for Indonesia and Thailand.