2026-09-23 · people
Still living under $2.15 a day
The global poverty line moved — the human count did not disappear.
Roughly 12% of the world's 8.2 billion people live below the World Bank's extreme poverty line — a threshold raised from $2.15 to $3 a day in June 2025, a change that added 125 million people to the count. The line moved; the hardship did not. Life below it typically means undernourishment and little access to electricity, safe drinking water, or education.
1 cell = 8.2 million people (0.1% of world population) · 1,000 cells
Context
The long-run direction is still downward: more than 1.5 billion fewer people live below the international poverty line than in 1990 — an average decline of about 118,000 people every day across 35 years. COVID-19 briefly reversed the trend, pushing roughly 50 million more people into extreme poverty 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 poorest now live in Sub-Saharan Africa, where weak economic growth and rapid population growth have pushed the absolute number up, and World Bank projections to 2030 show hundreds of millions still in extreme poverty on current trends.
Crossing the $3 threshold is a low bar. Around 24% of humanity lives on less than $5 a day, and about half lives on less than $10 — by the standards of today's high-income countries, most of the world remains poor.
World Bank PIP ~12% in extreme poverty, rounded.
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Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-09-23-extreme-poverty