UNICEF’s flagship report turns to child poverty and finds it is both widespread and, for the first time in years, at risk of rising again. Roughly one in five of the world’s children lives in extreme monetary poverty, and children are more than twice as likely as adults to be poor. A quarter century of progress is now colliding with conflict, climate shocks and a funding squeeze.
The headline
More than 412 million children live in households in extreme monetary poverty, on less than $3.00 a day, and 417 million children in low- and middle-income countries face severe deprivation in at least two of six essentials: education, health, housing, nutrition, sanitation and water. At the World Bank’s higher $8.30 line, about two in three children, some 1.4 billion, count as poor. The deprivation has been falling for 25 years, but the report warns that conflict, climate disasters, aid cuts and debt service are converging to stall and even reverse those gains.
The numbers
- Extreme monetary poverty. 412 million children live on less than $3.00 a day, or 19.2 per cent of the world’s children, and children are more than twice as likely as adults to be in extreme poverty.
- Multidimensional deprivation. 417 million children (22 per cent) in low- and middle-income countries face two or more severe deprivations; 118 million face three or more, and 17 million face four or more.
- A disproportionate share. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 23 per cent of the world’s children but 76 per cent of those in extreme poverty; with South Asia it accounts for 88 per cent of the total.
- Progress, slowing. Extreme child poverty fell from 507 million (24.3 per cent) in 2014 to 412 million (19.2 per cent) in 2024, and severe deprivation has dropped by a third since 2000, but the pace has stalled since the pandemic.
- A two-speed world. In fragile and conflict-affected states the extreme child poverty rate rose from 46 per cent to 50.2 per cent between 2014 and 2024, while in all other states it fell from 19.9 per cent to 11.4 per cent.
- The coverage gap. Only about a quarter of children were covered by social assistance in 2023, leaving 1.8 billion without support, with the sparsest coverage in low-income countries.
- What works. Bangladesh cut multidimensional child poverty by 32 percentage points from 2000 to 2023, and the report estimates that up to 175 million people could be lifted from extreme poverty by 2050 through decisive climate action.
The counting angle
The report’s method is its argument. Monetary poverty, it says, tells only part of the story, so UNICEF and partners model deprivation across 133 countries and six dimensions, then contrast it with the World Bank’s monetary lines. The two measures do not always agree, and the report is explicit that many children face severe deprivations inside households never counted as poor. It also names the blind spots: harmonized survey data is missing for a swath of low- and middle-income countries, displaced and refugee children routinely go uncounted, and all forms of poverty are undercounted in urban slums and informal settlements. One of its five enabling conditions is titled, plainly, count well and include all, a call for data disaggregated by gender, disability and location, and for measuring poverty at the level of the individual child rather than the household.
Watch & read
- The State of the World’s Children 2025, the full report (UNICEF).
- Global MPI 2025, the companion measure of multidimensional poverty across all ages.
Figures are as reported by UNICEF. Monetary estimates draw on the World Bank’s June 2025 poverty thresholds and 2024 data; multidimensional estimates are modelled from harmonized MICS and DHS surveys, and projections to 2030 and 2050 are the report’s own scenario estimates.