UN: 1 billion people live in extreme poverty

A new United Nations report has said that more than one billion people live in extreme poverty, and almost half of them are in countries suffering from conflicts.

According to the report published yesterday by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP): Countries affected by war have high levels of poverty in all indicators of "multidimensional poverty".

The UN criteria for extreme poverty take into account "extreme" differences in nutrition, access to electricity and energy, water and sanitation.

A study in 112 countries involving 6.3 billion people revealed that 1.1 billion people face poverty, and 455 million of them live "in the shadow of conflict".

In addition, the report stated that 83.2 percent of the poorest people in the world live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

India is the country with the largest number of people living in extreme poverty; where 234 million people out of its 1.4 billion people are suffering from poverty. It is followed by Pakistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The five countries together accounted for almost half of the 1.1 billion poor people suffering from poverty in the world.