12 Charts That Explain Global Poverty and What Has Changed

These twelve charts and maps, gathered by the anti-poverty campaign ONE in 2014, show global poverty from several angles at once: income and life expectancy, where the poorest people live, access to electricity and the internet, literacy, birth and death rates, and population growth. Together they tell a story with two sides. Over the long run, the world has become far healthier and richer, and the share of people in extreme poverty has fallen dramatically. At the same time, poverty has become concentrated in fewer places, especially sub-Saharan Africa, where it is much harder to shift.

The data behind these graphics is now more than a decade old, so for each one we explain what it showed, why it matters and, where it helps, how the picture has changed since. The international poverty line itself has moved: the $1.25 a day used in these charts was later raised to reflect prices, and since 2025 the World Bank uses $3.00 a day. By recent UN estimates, about 831 million people, roughly one in ten, still live below that line.

The charts are grouped by theme rather than kept in their original order, so related ideas sit side by side.

Income, health and the long view

1. Two centuries of life expectancy and income

Changes in life expectancies and incomes

This animation comes from Gapminder, the foundation set up in 2005 by Hans Rosling with his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund. Each bubble is a country, plotted by income per person and life expectancy from 1800 onward. In 1800 nearly every country sits in the same poor, short-lived corner; over time all of them move up and to the right, but at very different speeds, which is why the gap between rich and poor nations widened. Rosling died in 2017, and Gapminder's free tools, including Dollar Street, carry on his work.

2. The shrinking number of extremely poor people

Researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, made this animated graphic of how many people lived below the extreme poverty line, with projections from the early 2010s onward under best and worst cases. Spending is measured in purchasing power parity, which adjusts for price differences between countries. The forecasts proved broadly right: worldwide, the number of extremely poor people fell from about 2.3 billion in 1990 to around 830 million by 2025. The big exception is sub-Saharan Africa, the only region where the number rose.

Where the poorest people live

3. Countries with the most people in extreme poverty

This World Bank chart ranked countries by the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day. In 2014 India came first, followed by China and Nigeria, and all ten countries at the top were in Asia or Africa. It looked surprising because these are large, fast-growing economies, but sheer population size means even a modest poverty rate adds up to many millions of people. The ranking has changed since: China's extreme poverty has almost vanished, India's has fallen sharply, and by recent estimates the Democratic Republic of the Congo has the largest number of extremely poor people, with sub-Saharan Africa home to about 73% of the world's total.

4. The relative size of African economies

Each square in this graphic is scaled to the size of a country's economy (GDP), and at the time it showed South Africa's square towering over most of its neighbours. Size tells you nothing about how wealth is shared, though. For that, economists use the Gini coefficient, which runs from 0 (everyone has the same income) to 1 (one person has everything). South Africa, the largest square here, actually has one of the highest income Gini scores in the world, at around 0.63, a reminder that a big economy and widespread prosperity are not the same thing.

Energy and the digital divide

5. Who has access to electricity

On this World Bank map, the darkest areas have the lowest access to electricity, and sub-Saharan Africa stands out: in 2010 more than half its people had no reliable power. Without electricity, children struggle to study after dark, clinics cannot keep vaccines cold, and small businesses cannot run machines or charge phones. ONE campaigned for the US Electrify Africa Act, which President Obama signed into law in February 2016 to support new power generation and connections across the region.

6. Internet access compared with population

This map by data journalist Gregor Aisch places internet use, measured through the location of IP addresses, against where people actually live. Densely populated regions such as India appear starved of connections relative to their size (shown in blue), while thinly populated places like Australia and the central United States appear well connected (in red). The digital divide matters because online access now shapes education, banking and job searches, and although mobile internet has spread quickly since 2014, the poorest countries still lag furthest behind.

Education and literacy

7. Literacy rates by region and gender

Part of an education data series produced by Gregor Aisch for the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, this chart compares adult literacy across regions and between men and women. Industrialised countries are close to universal literacy, while sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa still had large shares of adults who could not read or write. The lower a region's overall literacy, the wider the gap between men and women tends to be, which matters because educating girls is linked to better family health and incomes. The same series also tracks school enrolment and compares spending on education with military spending.

Population, births and deaths

8. How fast each country's population is growing

Published by The Washington Post in 2013, this map colours each country by its population growth rate. Many of the poorest countries, especially in Africa, were growing fastest, while Japan, Russia and much of Eastern Europe were shrinking. The usual reason is timing: death rates fall first as health care improves, and birth rates fall later, so populations surge in between.

9. The most populous countries in 1950, 2013 and 2050

This graphic, shared by ICEF Monitor from The Economist, ranks the world's most populous nations at three points in time. Europe dominated the 1950 list; by 2013 Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria had joined the top dozen, and the 2050 forecast had three African countries and none from Europe. The Economist expected that "more than half of the extra 2.4 billion people in 2050 will be African." One forecast arrived early: it had India passing China in 2028, but by UN estimates India became the world's most populous country in 2023.

10. Births per woman around the world

From Nathan Yau's FlowingData "State of the World" series, this chart shows the average number of children per woman by country. Of the twelve countries with the highest fertility, all but Afghanistan and Timor-Leste were in Africa. Birth rates are one of the best predictors of future population growth, and they tend to fall as girls stay in school longer and child survival improves.

11. Child and infant mortality

Also from FlowingData, this dense graphic compares deaths of children under five in developing and industrialised countries, with 2005 figures highlighted, and lists the ten countries with the worst infant mortality. All of those ten were in Africa except Afghanistan. Child deaths are one of the clearest measures of poverty, because most are caused by preventable or treatable illness, and they have fallen sharply worldwide since these figures were collected.

If the world were 100 people

12. Demographics of a 100-person world

This pair of graphics shrinks the whole planet to a village of 100 people, turning percentages into numbers anyone can picture. At the time it showed that 60 of the 100 would live in Asia, 17 would be unable to read and 13 would lack access to clean water. It is the simplest chart in the set, but perhaps the most memorable, because it turns abstract statistics into neighbours.

What these charts teach, a decade on

Looking back, the optimistic message of these charts has largely held: life expectancy, incomes, literacy and child survival have all kept improving in most of the world. The warning has held too. Extreme poverty is now concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and in countries affected by conflict, where progress has been slowest and populations are growing fastest. When you read any poverty chart, check the year, the poverty line used and whether it shows numbers of people or percentages, because each can change the story it seems to tell.

Sources: Charts collected by ONE (2014); individual charts by Gapminder, the World Bank, the Brookings Institution, Deutsche Welle/Gregor Aisch, The Washington Post, The Economist/ICEF Monitor, Business Insider and FlowingData, as linked above. Updates: Extreme poverty, Gapminder Foundation, Gini coefficient and Demographics of India (Wikipedia); ONE: Electrify Africa.

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