By the end of 2022, as many as 685 million people could still be living in extreme poverty.

For three decades, the number of people living in extreme poverty— defined as those who live on less than $2.15 per person per day at 2017 purchasing power parity—was declining. But the trend was interrupted in 2020, when poverty rose due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 crisis. The number of people in extreme poverty rose by 70 million to more than 700 million people. The global extreme poverty rate reached 9.3 percent, up from 8.4 percent in 2019. The world’s poorest people bore the steepest costs of the pandemic. Their income losses were twice as high as the world’s richest, and global inequality rose for the first time in decades.