Around 1 in 5 children today are living in extreme poverty, according to new . In 2024, an estimated 412 million children aged 17 or younger were residing in households living on less than $3 a day, the extreme poverty line used for low-income countries.

Globally, child poverty has been on a steady, if slow, decline since 2014, when an estimated 507 million children lived in extreme poverty. However, the pace of poverty reduction among children has been slower compared to the general population. Children continue to be disproportionately affected, comprising more than 50 percent of those in extreme poverty, although their share of the global population is just 30 percent.

Today, child poverty is increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and fragile and conflict-affected places.

Child poverty rates vary substantially across regions. While Sub Saharan Africa is home to about 23 percent of the world¡¯s population of children, it is home to about three quarters (over 312 million) of all children living in extreme poverty. At around 52 percent in 2024, the extreme child poverty rate in the region remains the same as in 2014.

South Asia and East Asia and the Pacific are estimated to have experienced important reductions in the child poverty rate over the period 2014¨C2024. In South Asia, extreme poverty was cut by more than half in the last decade, with India seeing the largest reduction in the number of extreme poor children in the region.

In contrast, extreme child poverty in the Middle East and North Africa region is projected to have increased over the same period. The extreme child poverty rate is projected to have almost doubled between 2014 and 2024, increasing from 7.2 percent to 13.3  percent.

Addressing structural inequalities, strengthening social protection, and prioritizing vulnerable regions like Sub-Saharan Africa are essential to tackling child poverty and ensuring every child has the opportunity to thrive. Ending child poverty requires a collective, sustained commitment from global and national stakeholders.

The research is the latest in a series of World Bank-UNICEF collaborations that started in 2016, but builds more closely on research conducted in 2023 to examine global child poverty. The poverty estimates used follow the June 2025 vintage of the World Bank¡¯s Global Monitoring Database (GMD). This new vintage is able to include information from several surveys conducted in recent years, thus providing improved estimates of the post-pandemic years.

The international poverty lines were updated in June 2025. The three poverty lines are now: $3 (extreme poverty; low-income), $4.20 (lower-middle-income) and $8.30 (upper-middle-income). The study is the first using the World Bank¡¯s recently revised global poverty lines.