2026-07-18 · people
Still living under $2.15 a day
The global poverty line moved — the human count did not disappear.
About one in eight people alive today — 12% of the world's 8.2 billion — live in extreme poverty. In June 2025 the World Bank raised its line from $2.15 to $3.00 a day, adding 125 million people to the tally without making the world poorer. The bar moved; the deprivation stayed. This grid shows who is still living under it.
1 cell = 8.2 million people (0.1% of world population) · 1,000 cells
Context
The long-run direction is real: more than 1.5 billion fewer people live below the international line than in 1990, an average of about 118,000 people a day over 35 years. But COVID-19 pushed roughly 50 million people back below the line between 2019 and 2020 — the first substantial rise in a generation — and progress since has resumed at a slower pace.
Poverty's center of gravity has shifted. Most of the world's extreme poor now live in Sub-Saharan Africa, where weak economic growth and rapid population growth have pushed numbers up; World Bank projections see hundreds of millions still in extreme poverty on current trends through 2030.
The $3 line is an extremely low bar, set to mirror the poverty lines of the world's poorest countries and below the cost of a healthy diet. At higher thresholds the need widens: about 24% of humanity lives on less than $5 a day, and roughly half on less than $10.
World Bank PIP ~12% in extreme poverty, rounded.
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Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-07-18-extreme-poverty