DEEP Dives | February 2026 | New evidence, insights and policy takeaways on extreme poverty

Welcome to the third edition of DEEP Dives! The quarterly bulletin from the Data and Evidence to End Extreme Poverty (DEEP) research programme. This is what we’ve been reading over the last few months.

Updated projections from Our World in Data, The End of Progress Against Extreme Poverty?,  reveal that, on the basis of current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. This is in stark contrast to progress over the last 35 years when, on any average day, about 115,000 people exited extreme poverty. As a sobering final sentence, the article reveals that: “If the poorest countries do not start to grow, a very bleak future is ahead of us: a future in which extreme poverty remains the reality for hundreds of millions for many years to come.”

Another approach to understanding global poverty without using poverty lines, Global Poverty Trends From a New Lens, highlights the 55% reduction in global poverty since 1990 and argues that 78% of this change is due to income growth, with 21% due to changes in inequality. Or, that most of the progress in global poverty reduction over the last three decades has come from economic growth.

What Would It Cost to End Extreme Poverty? (Center for Effective Global Action) is somewhat more optimistic about the future – arguing that advances in statistical learning, when applied to existing government administrative data systems, have the potential to significantly reduce the costs of eliminating extreme poverty. They estimate it would cost around 0.3% of GDP.

Who’s living in extreme poverty? Burchi and Malerba construct an individual-level measure of multi-dimensional poverty in Gender Differences in Multidimensional Poverty in Low‐ and Middle‐Income Countries. Using individual-level data from 78 countries, they find that female poverty exceeds male poverty by 58–85% in the median country, with the largest disparities in Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and South Asia. Most countries show rising female-to-male poverty ratios, indicating a feminisation of poverty.

And, looking at poverty regionally, Ten Findings about Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean (Economía LACEA Journal)synthesises recent survey data to examine who is poor, how they live and how poverty has changed over time. Two-thirds of the region’s poor and just over half of the region’s extreme poor live in urban areas. On average, 88% of households in extreme poverty were chronically poor – remaining in poverty over time.

There is more on the duration of poverty from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) – Long-Term Outcomes of Multi-Context Childhood Poverty: Evidence from Long Panel Data from Indonesia. This paper finds that adverse outcomes in adulthood are robustly associated not only with a poor family but also with a poor community.

And two papers covering drivers of poverty. The first, on conflict and climate, From Shock to Structure: Persistent Effects of Conflict on Multidimensional Poverty in Mali, provides an analysis of nationally representative survey data, revealing that armed conflict raises the likelihood of multidimensional poverty by 10.4 percentage points – and climate shocks independently add another 9.4 points (see also DEEP papers on intersecting crises). Conflict further exacerbates inequality.

The second paper, Impacts of Global Warming on Subnational Poverty and Inequality (Nature Climate Change), focuses on climate, analysing data from 130 countries. It finds that each 1°C rise in temperature increases poverty headcounts by up to 1.18 percentage points and inequality by up to 1.9%. The results imply that, unless mitigation measures are put in place, up to 98 million people could be added to current forecasts for global poverty by 2030 owing to climate change (see also DEEP paper on temperature variability as a driver of poverty).

Brookings has a helpful overview of how Kerala eliminated extreme poverty.

There are also several recent articles on the psychological aspects of poverty. A new systematic review, across low and middle-income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries (HICs), finds that combining poverty reduction interventions with psychological ones (such as through cash plus approaches) produces more consistent improvements in wellbeing and socioeconomic outcomes.

How Does a Rural Poverty Alleviation Program Affect Parents’ Aspirations About Their Children? Evidence from BRAC-TUP in Bangladesh, an example of a combined intervention, finds that the BRAC programme reduces the aspirational gaps for boys only. And in, another article from Bangladesh, Poverty and Stigma in Urban Bangladesh: Conceptual Contributions and Empirical Explorations, Roelen et al. highlight how stigma interacts with poverty, shaping the lived experiences of dignity and wellbeing.