The note also features an in-depth profile of extreme poverty at a global scale using household survey data collected in 73 countries during the 2000. On the one hand, it offers valuable insights as to where poverty is deeply seated and where stronger efforts are needed: more than three quarters of those living in extreme poverty are in rural areas and nearly
two thirds of the extremely poor earn a living from agriculture. On the other hand, some results are alarming and disturbing. More than one-third of the extremely poor individuals are children under age of 13, and half of children in LICs are in extreme poverty.
The global gender gap in education is concentrated among the poor. Poor women aged 15 to 30, on average, have a year less schooling than poor men of the same age group. For
the nonpoor, the gender gap is almost half of the gap for the poor.
Access to essential utilities such as electricity, water, and sanitation are very limited among the poor. The nonpoor are more than twice as likely to have water, and three times as likely to have sanitation. While 87 percent of the nonpoor have electricity, among the poor, just under half have electricity.
The rest of the note is organized as follows. The next section discusses trends in poverty rates and poor population in the developing world between 1981 and 2010, followed by a detailed analysis on the depth of poverty and average income of the poor. The fourth section introduces the concept of the Aggregate Poverty Gap as a proxy for the remaining magnitude of extreme poverty and demonstrates how this measure has become less important relative to the size of economic activities measured by GDP, except for LICs. Results from global poverty profiling are discussed in the fifth section. The final section concludes.