Social protection for the extreme poor: what works?

Although the share of population living on less than $1.90 per day worldwide dropped from around 35 percent to 11 percent between 1990 and 2013, 767 million people still live in extreme poverty—more than half of them in Africa south of the Sahara. It would be practically impossible to reach the Sustainable Development Goal of eliminating poverty through growth alone. Rather, meeting SDG 1 by 2030 requires targeted interventions that can make sustainable improvements in the lives of the extreme poor. Identifying effective social protection programs that can reach them and make sustainable changes in their livelihoods is critical to this effort.

Photo credit: Dominic Chavez/World Bank