Sustainable Development Goal #1 is to end poverty in all its forms everywhere.
Within SDG #1 are 7 targets, of which this episode will focus on Target 1.1, which is:
By 2030 eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day.
The year 2030 has been set as the deadline for this target, to be met in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals as a whole. With the ambitious target of eradicating extreme poverty for all people everywhere, we need to understand the definition of ‘extreme poverty’.
Extreme poverty is defined by an international poverty line as deemed by the World Bank, the international financial institution within the UN system, tasked with providing loans to developing countries with the objective of poverty eradication.
The international poverty line, as this target explains, is measured by living on $1.25 a day. That $1.25 a day is measured in U.S. dollars, using 2005 prices. Since the SDGs have been adopted, the measure of extreme poverty has been raised by the World Bank to $1.90 using 2011 prices.
Wherever one may live, and whatever the local prices of goods and services, less than US$2 a day is scarcely enough to meet basic needs of safe drinking water, food at or below subsistence, and access to health and education.
Approximately 700 million people met the definition of living in extreme poverty when the SDGs were adopted in 2015, the overwhelming majority living in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Before the industrial era, beginning in the middle of the 19th century, close to all of the human population lived in a state of extreme poverty.
Yet, as this graph demonstrates, since the turn of the millennium, there has been a steady decrease in both the overall number of people living in extreme poverty, as well as the percentage of the global population.
One of the key reasons for this encouraging drop in extreme poverty rates was the power of the Millennium Development Goals. The Millenium Development Goals were the preceding development framework of the UN, prior to the adoption of the SDGs.
The focus of the MDGs was on the fight against extreme poverty, and its accompanying ills, with the SDGs building upon these efforts.
Conceptually, sustainable development builds upon the international development focus of the MDGs’ focus on economic development, to add two more pillars: that is, ensuring any economic growth is broad-based and socially inclusive, as well as being environmentally sustainable.
The sister goal of SDG #1 was Millennium Development Goal #1, set to halve extreme poverty levels by 2015, again using the international poverty line measure of $1.25 of income, in this case, measuring the proportion according to 1990 prices.
Millennium Development Goal #1 was met five years before its due date in 2010, largely due to the astounding growth rates of China in the 1-year period of the MDGs between 2000 and 2015.
In total numbers, this meant MDG #1 saw a billion people lifted from extreme poverty, compared to 1990, when almost half the population of countries considered developing lived under $1.25 a day.
Yet the 800 million still left behind at the end of the Millennium Development Goals period in 2015 is an enormous number of people continuing to live in destitution and penury.
So how do we measure this target 1.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals?
The indicator in use by the UN is ‘proportion of population below the international poverty line by sex, age, employment status and geographical location.
The disaggregation by sex, age, employment status, and geographical location is to ensure the gains are measured evenly across all demographics, ensuring no one is left behind, and all economic development is broad-based to meet the social inclusivity pillar of sustainable development.
According to the World Data Lab, there were at June 2021, 716, 045,000 people presently living in extreme poverty, with a rate of 0.8 people per second escaping extreme poverty.
Yet the target rate for escaping poverty for SDG target 1.1 to be met is 2.4 people per second.
In total, that means again for June 2021, the world is off-track by 231,163,000 people approximately.
Of course, just as some escape poverty, others enter into it.
The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted progress on this goal and target, with signs of slowing progress even before this, compounded by both conflict and climate change.
In 2015, the proportion of extreme poverty rates was 10%, this dropped from a low of 8.4% in 2019, back up to 9.5%. This can be equated with up to 124 million people being thrown back into extreme poverty, meaning the global extreme poverty rate rose in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years.
Furthermore, this trend projected 6 percent of the global population, or 600 million people, would still be living in extreme poverty in 2030, missing the target 1.1.
