UN DESA Policy Brief No. 160: The Dynamics of Poverty - Creating Resilience to Sustain Progress

The World Social Report 2025 (forthcoming) will offer a survey of social challenges that stand in the way of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. A series of thematic papers is being developed by UNDESA to provide more detailed analysis on each of these challenges, including the core commitments from the 1995 Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action. The first of the thematic papers focuses on poverty, and draws on a background paper produced by Andrew Shepherd and Vidya Diwakar. Linked to the thematic paper and its associated policy brief are presented here.

The thematic paper recognizes that world has made significant headway towards eradicating poverty in recent decades. Accelerating the speed of progress and avoiding setbacks remain critical challenges. While poverty is increasingly entrenched in the poorest countries and regions, the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent crises have exposed that gains are fragile, even in countries that had succeeded in reducing it. Growing evidence on the dynamics of poverty shows that many people are still one misfortune away from falling below the poverty line. Many do so, despite declines in the total number of people in poverty. Progress in reducing it is much more volatile than the conventional, aggregate picture of gradual reductions suggests. Covid-19 and the growing threats from climate change and conflict serve as yet another reminder that reaching the elusive goal of eradicating poverty is not only a matter of lifting people above it. It also requires creating resilience.

Read the thematic paper here

Poverty, Hunger and Jobs: Pandemic Update and Recovery Prospects

The COVID-19 pandemic and intersecting crises— including climate change, conflict, debt, and the ‘triple F’ crisis (food, fuel, finance)— have reversed progress on a range of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), increasing the number of people in poverty, contributing to a dramatic rise in hunger and food insecurity, increasing gender inequalities, and constraining the effectiveness of interventions to promote pro-poor livelihoods and decent jobs.

In many countries, the post-COVID-19 recovery has been slow and incomplete. To promote the joining up of SDGs (1- no poverty, 2- zero hunger, 8- decent work and economic growth), CPAN/IDS, IFPRI, Southern Voice, and the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development co-convened a three-day virtual international workshop in June 2023 on “poverty, hunger and jobs”. Its aim was to synthesise latest knowledge and data about the effects and the effectiveness of policy responses on these issues, and to work out its policy/programming implications to re-establish positive development progress on hunger, jobs and poverty.

This brief outlines key takeaways and recommendations from the workshop presentations and discussions.

Download the resources

Literature Review: Poverty Dynamics and Drivers in Zambia (1964-2019)

The Zambian Chronic poverty study, for which this literature review has been conducted, investigates and interrogates chronic poverty dynamics in Zambia. Although chronic poverty has existed for a long time, no specific study of this magnitude and scope has been conducted to provide a comprehensive understanding of chronic poverty dynamics in the country. The study has two objectives as follows:

• The study seeks to establish a dynamic understanding of the chronically poor in the post-2010 period in Zambia, to draw conclusions about who is being left behind, why and what can be done about it.

• The second objective is to establish a qualitative baseline for future monitoring work, similar to the WIDE project in Ethiopia.

The key research questions include:

• Why has extreme poverty (and hunger) remained at such a high level and so widespread especially in rural areas, despite economic growth, political stability, and a reasonable human development record?

• To what extent is this accounted for by chronic poverty or by mobility around the poverty line or different combinations of these in different places?

• What are the main sources of vulnerability, and how do these combine to impoverish or allow only temporary escapes from poverty where this is the case?

• Why are women headed households typically poorer than men-headed households? And what is the contribution of gender and other social relationships to sustained escapes/chronic poverty/impoverishment?

• Urban poverty is held to have declined faster than rural. Why is this? Is urban poverty and wellbeing correctly estimated? What results do alternative measures of urban poverty give?

• How are policies and major programmes contributing to poverty dynamics?

This literature demonstrates that, despite a favourable economy at Independence and some years afterwards, Zambia’s poverty levels have ranked among the highest in the world. Over the past five decades, Zambia has undergone several somewhat distinct policy regimes, each with varied implications on poverty. This review is divided into two sections. The first section analyses the performance of the Zambian economy over five decades, from 1964 to 2016, to reflect on policies and strategies that drove, sustained and/or reduced poverty levels and to place Zambia’s economic growth, structural changes and declines in a historical and socio-economic policy perspectives. The second section provides a conceptual and methodological overview, a detailed analysis of the historical and present poverty conditions and trends including ongoing and future poverty reduction strategies and interventions.

Authors: Phillimon Ndubani, Bwalya Chiti, Tamara Billima, Marja Hineflaar, Virginia Bond

Read the full paper here

Youth inclusion in labour markets in Niger: Policy briefs on education, migration, and entrepreneurship

This set of briefs is based on the mixed methods research that identified factors that challenge and enable young adults’ inclusion in the world of work in Niger, through a gender-streamlined analysis of different poverty trajectories of livelihoods and how these are affected by training, education and migration. Each brief focuses on one of the key themes of the research findings: education and training, migration, and entrepreneurship. It collectively draws attention to key areas that require policy action in order to improve youth inclusion in labour markets in ways that can facilitate their pathways out of poverty.

Read the policy brief on education here

Read the policy brief on migration here

Read the policy brief on entrepreneurship here

Read the associated report here

Read the associated methods paper here

Authors: Andrew Shepherd, Abdoutan Harouna, Cecilia Poggi, Vidya Diwakar, Aïssa Diarra, Lucia Da Corta

Poverty dynamics and social protection in Nigeria

Nigeria has a large and growing share of people living in poverty. Roughly 40.1% of its population live below the national poverty line, while a similar share (46.4%) are multidimensionally poor based on deprivations in education, health, and living standards. Covid19 has amplified these concerns, forecasted by the World Bank to push an estimated additional 10 million Nigerians into extreme poverty by 2022.

This study investigates key drivers associated with descents into and exits from relative monetary poverty across zones of Nigeria, the ways in which COVID-19 pandemic are likely to impact these dynamics, and implications for the design of social protection programmes and policy in Nigeria. It analyses: 1) the Nigeria General Household Survey Panel from 2010/11-2015/16, 2) nine rounds of the Covid19 National Longitudinal Phone Survey 2020-2021, 3) the Nigeria Living Standards Survey 2018/19, and 4) a series of key informant interviews with social protection stakeholders in 2021. The results of the study point to a combination of asset and livelihood-based enablers for households to sustain poverty escapes, and draw out implications for the design of social protection in Nigeria in the time ahead.

Read the full report here

Read the briefing note here

Authors: Vidya Diwakar and Adeniran Adedeji

The research is funded through FCDO and commissioned by Save the Children International (Nigeria) and Action Against Hunger through the Child Development Grant Programme.