THE INTERNATIONAL FOCUS on eliminating extreme poverty globally has grown since the late twentieth century, even among those who don’t view its elimination as utopian but simply as plausible. The most internationally recognised of these attempts came through the Millennium Development Goals, which were succeeded by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, which began to be implemented in 2016 to be achieved by 2030). The former included a goal to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015, while the latter aims (among other things) to end poverty everywhere in all its forms, including extreme poverty.

Indeed, since the 1990s, substantial reductions in extreme poverty have been achieved – one billion fewer people lived in extreme poverty in 2015 than in 1990, with significant progress recorded by countries in East Asia (particularly China), the Pacific and South Asia. However, since 2015, the pace of this progress has slowed, in part because poverty is now concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which has experienced both slower rates of poverty reduction than other regions and high population growth.[i]