Share of children in extreme poverty drops below 1% for the first time

Story: 2047 C.E. ???  |  Last updated: May 17, 2026

Note: This is an imagined future story, written as if a projected milestone has occurred. It is based on current trends and evidence, not confirmed events.

For the first time in recorded history, fewer than 1% of the world’s children live in extreme poverty — a milestone that seemed unthinkable just two decades ago, when roughly one in six children survived on less than $2.15 a day. The 2047 C.E. figure, compiled by the World Bank’s annual social protection index, marks a quiet but staggering turning point: a problem that once touched hundreds of millions of young lives has effectively been pushed to the margins of human experience.

The shift did not happen through a single policy or a single generation of leaders. It accumulated, year by year, through the steady expansion of direct cash transfer programs — government-administered payments made directly to families, often with few strings attached — that now reach more than two billion people across low- and middle-income countries.

The scenario

• Child poverty rate: The share of children living in extreme poverty has fallen below 1%, down from roughly 17% in the early 2020s C.E.
• Cash transfer coverage: Direct cash transfer programs now reach an estimated 2.1 billion people globally, compared to about 1 billion in 2020 C.E.
• Regional progress: Sub-Saharan Africa — once home to the highest concentration of children in extreme poverty — has seen child poverty rates fall by more than 85% since 2025 C.E., driven largely by national social protection floors adopted with World Bank and regional development bank support.

What made it work

The evidence base was already strong in the 2020s C.E. Dozens of randomized evaluations had shown that cash transfers — when delivered reliably and at meaningful scale — reduced child malnutrition, improved school attendance, and helped families weather shocks without selling assets or pulling children out of school. The argument was settled. What took time was the political will and the fiscal architecture to go further.

That architecture came together through a combination of forces. Domestic revenue mobilization improved steadily across low-income countries after international agreements closed the most damaging corporate tax loopholes in the late 2020s C.E. Multilateral development banks shifted their lending priorities toward social protection floors. And digital payment infrastructure — mobile money networks built out across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia through the 2030s C.E. — made it possible to reach remote communities that had previously been excluded by the sheer cost of delivery.

None of this was seamless. Corruption, exclusion errors, and political disruption delayed progress in dozens of countries. Some programs underpaid for years. Others were cut during fiscal crises. The last percentage point took longer than anyone expected.

The children the data doesn’t fully capture

The sub-1% figure refers specifically to income-based extreme poverty. It does not capture every dimension of deprivation.

Children living in conflict zones — particularly in parts of the Sahel and Central Asia — remain disproportionately excluded from formal social protection systems, even as overall numbers have fallen. Researchers tracking multidimensional child poverty, which accounts for access to clean water, healthcare, and education alongside income, put the true share of severely deprived children somewhat higher.

Advocates are careful to name this. “Income poverty and human poverty are not the same thing,” said one researcher at the African Development Bank in a briefing this week. “We should celebrate what cash transfers have achieved. We should also be honest about what still needs to happen.”

The roots of the shift

Some of the most consequential programs were built by governments that rarely make international headlines. Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme, Kenya’s Hunger Safety Net Programme, and Brazil’s long-running Bolsa Família — updated and scaled repeatedly over decades — became templates studied and adapted across more than 60 countries.

Indigenous and rural communities, often the last to benefit from national programs, saw the most significant proportional gains after targeted program expansions in the 2030s and 2040s C.E. Several governments worked directly with community organizations to redesign payment structures and eligibility rules that had historically excluded nomadic and seasonally mobile families.

Progress on renewable energy expansion helped too — electrification unlocked the mobile banking infrastructure that made transfers deliverable, and cheaper energy reduced household expenditure on fuel, effectively stretching the value of every dollar transferred.

Meanwhile, broader improvements in human wellbeing reinforced the gains. Research on declining global suicide rates has pointed to reduced financial stress as one contributing factor — a reminder that economic security and mental health are not separate problems.

What comes next

The World Bank’s 2047 C.E. report does not treat this moment as an endpoint. The institution’s current framework calls for strengthening adaptive social protection — systems that can automatically scale up during climate shocks, pandemics, or conflict — so that the children who are lifted out of extreme poverty stay out.

That is the part that still requires sustained effort. Cash transfers work, the evidence confirms. Keeping them funded, targeted, and politically protected across decades of change is the harder and less celebrated task.

Still, for the first time, less than 1% of the world’s children are growing up in extreme poverty. That is not a footnote. That is one of the most significant achievements in the long story of human progress — built, quietly, through the decision to simply give struggling families money and trust them to use it well.

Read more

For more on this story, see: World Bank — Cash Transfers

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
• Global suicide rate has fallen by 40% since 1995
• The Good News for Humankind archive on poverty

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