Giving Compass' Take:

• Geoffrey Gertz and Homi Kharas highlight gaps in co-operative efforts to end global poverty that leave vulnerable groups behind based on 2018 data. 

• How can funders work to fill in these gaps? What partnerships can best create sustainable change in poor communities? 

• Learn about ways to alleviate extreme poverty. 

The pledge to leave no one behind is a universal one; it bears on all aspects of sustainable development and encapsulates the need for policies and investments to be people-centered for current and future generations. However, when it comes to understanding what it means to leave no one behind, looking at national averages is not enough: they mask diverse situations and needs as well as the drivers of discrimination, disadvantage, and exclusion. The following analyses, take subject-specific perspectives to consider what it means to leave no one – no woman or no man, no young person, no person with a disability, no voter, no citizen, no inhabitant of a particular country or fragile context – behind. While there is no magic bullet or one-size-fits-all answer to the pledge, contributions to this chapter demonstrate that there are vital, intersecting commonalities to being left behind.

Poverty
  • Global extreme poverty declined at the fastest rate in human history over the past 20 years thanks to high average growth in some highly populated countries.
  • Pathways to end the remaining 10% of extreme poverty will depend on progress in 31 severely off-track countries that will have poverty headcount ratios of at least 20% in 2030. Twenty-three of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Donor strategies need to evolve to a new reality of extreme poverty. Sixty-six percent of the global population living in extreme poverty live in severely off-track countries – just 22% and 24% of bilateral and multilateral allocations of country programmable aid went to these countries in 2016.
  • Aid effectiveness is reduced in severely off-track countries by year-on-year volatility of aid flows, making long-term development strategies difficult to implement.
  • Evaluations show that projects in challenging contexts are as successful as in other developing countries. Donors should scale up successful individual projects in these countries to achieve greater impact and sustainable, transformative progress.

The nature of the global poverty challenge is changing. Over the last 20 years, global extreme poverty declined at the fastest rate in human history. The first Millennium Development Goal (MDG), to halve the extreme poverty rate between 1990 and 2015, was achieved several years ahead of schedule. Building on this progress, in 2015 the world united around the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, the first of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

If we simply extrapolate based on past progress, this goal appears within reach. Between 1990 and 2015, the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty fell by about one percentage point a year. The World Bank estimates that, as of 2015, about 10% of the world lived on less than USD 1.90 a day. Thus, if previous trends continue, we could expect to see the end of extreme poverty sometime around 2025.

Such back-of-the-envelope calculations, however, are misleading. Indeed, the nature of the fight against extreme poverty is evolving, and the pathway to achieving the poverty SDG will be qualitatively different from that which worked during the MDG period. Success during the MDG era was propelled by high average growth in a number of economies that accounted for the bulk of the world’s poor – including the People’s Republic of China (“China”), India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Viet Nam, and Ethiopia. But many of these countries are close to eliminating extreme poverty, and thus their impact on global aggregate poverty figures is rapidly declining. Today extreme poverty is increasingly concentrated in a set of countries that have achieved only limited development success in recent decades, and whose prospects for rapid growth appear slim.

The MDG poverty target was met despite many of the poorest countries making only minimal progress. Success during the SDG era, on the other hand, will depend precisely on what happens in these poorest countries, the countries that are most at risk of being left behind. These are the places where bilateral and multilateral development partners must focus their efforts if they are to maximize the likelihood of ending extreme poverty everywhere in the world by 2030.

Read the full article about co-operative efforts to end poverty by Geoffrey Gertz and Homi Kharas at OECD iLibrary.