Imagine what it's like to live in extreme
poverty.
You have to think about the basics like your
next meal all the time.
An extremely poor family mostly has access
only to the food that they grow themselves.
If you have a bad harvest, if one of your
animals get sick,
you're going to have a period where you're
not getting enough food.
Daughters in these families have to gather
water and wood.
They have to cook dinners on an open fire
with lots of smoke,
and then they have to clean everything up.
If they get a chance to do schoolwork at all,
it's going to be very late at night.
They need a lamp, if they have it, to be able
to do that work.
So, the upshot is, if you're extremely poor,
your time and energy really goes to mere survival.
Is poverty inevitable?
The answer is no.
We asked 2,000 people what they thought was
going on with poverty.
We told them the 1990 number and asked them
to guess where it had gone.
And their guess was that it had fallen from
that 36 percent down to 22 percent.
In fact, the real line is far, far better.
It drops all the way down to 9 percent.
That means since 1990, 1.2 billion people
have overcome extreme poverty.
As the economist Max Roser has said,
"The newspapers could have run a headline,
'Number of People in Poverty Fell by 137,000
Since Yesterday,'
every single day for 25 years and been right."
Real news.
According to the World Bank,
this extreme poverty definition we use is
a cutoff of about a $1.90 per day or less.
Getting out of extreme poverty is not the
end goal.
We want people lifted up way beyond extreme
poverty.
But it's really the start that gets things
going,
that gets countries on the way to self-sufficiency
and moving towards middle income.
So, this is not just about the individuals,
it's also about the countries themselves.
A single dot is representing a million people.
Right now, you're seeing the number of dots
that represent the number of people
who overcame poverty since 1990.
It’s really great to see how we made that
incredible reduction,
because it hints, okay, what remains, what
do we have to do in the future.
The progress came really in two great waves.
The first wave was China.
In 1990, 66 percent of people in China were
extremely poor.
So, you can see all the dots there, each representing
again a million people.
But over just a short period of 15 years,
their extreme poverty declined by over 500
million.
The improvement in people's lives there is
one of the most
astonishing examples of progress in world
history.
The second wave came in India.
Progress there started later and it's been
more gradual,
but it's also an impressive trend.
India went from 400 million people in extreme
poverty in 2005
to just under 100 million today.
And over the next several decades, that number
is going to drop quite a bit.
So, the question we face here is,
can we create a third great wave of poverty
reduction in the rest of the world
that will bring extreme poverty near to eradication?
It’s not going to be easy.
We can go back to our dots,
again looking at each one representing a million
people.
But now we're going to look at the people
who remain in extreme poverty.
So, starting back in 1990,
we're going to take all those dots
and do a pie chart that gives us a sense of
what it looked like by region back in 1990.
So, you can see sub-Saharan Africa,
the blue part there, represented a relatively
small slice of extreme poverty in 1990.
But because this has fallen so quickly in
East and South Asia,
so we're dropping the total number of people
a lot.
But also, as we drop those numbers,
you can see that that sub-Saharan slice,
the blue slice,
is getting to be a very substantial part of
this pie.
In fact, if we project this out to 2050, it's
rather stunning.
It's a trend that I sort of was aware of,
but even I was surprised when we ran these
numbers that it shows
that almost 90 percent of the people remaining
in extreme poverty
will be in sub-Saharan Africa by 2050.
If we zoom in even more,
and take it at the country level,
we can see that there's quite a variability
in the progress here.
We see that a few countries represent a lot
of what remains,
about a dozen here.
In fact, if you just take the two countries
with the most people,
which would be the Democratic Republic of
Congo and Nigeria,
that alone will be 40 percent of the entire
world's population in extreme poverty.
And if we zoom even further in and look at
a map of Nigeria and say, okay,
where inside Nigeria will you have this, based
on 2013 data,
we can see that it's not spread evenly.
As you move towards the north,
there's far more poverty than in the south.
And so, this gap that you're seeing there
grows quite a bit over time.
What this means is that this poverty is going
to be a feature of life in a few places.
And these are places where there’re the
fewest opportunities.
Often, in some of these places there's violence,
a lack of stability.
These are places where climate change
will make these subsistence farmers' lives
more difficult.
Also, these are often places where the governance
is not providing the primary health care
or education, even at a basic level.
And every one of these places are exactly
where we're experiencing
rapid population growth.
The geography of births in the world is changing,
and this is something that's really fascinating.
Over the rest of this century,
the number of babies born stays about the
same.
We've really reached peak baby.
But if we look at this chart,
we can see that the places that they're born
are changing.
We've split it into a blue line, which is
babies born in sub-Saharan Africa every year,
and the white line, which is the entire rest
of the world.
And you can see you go from today,
where by the end of the century
up to where by the end of the century
it's almost getting up to the point where
half of the babies on the planet
are born not just in sub-Saharan Africa
but overwhelmingly in the poorest parts of
sub-Saharan Africa.
So, the ten countries projected to be the
poorest in the world in 2050
currently are only 10 percent of the world's births.
By 2050 they're 20 percent,
and by 2100, using these UNFPA numbers, it
could get up to 40 percent.
So, in short, babies are going to be born
in what are currently the toughest circumstances
in the most challenging places in the world.
They'll be born in situations
where they'll at least start out spending
all their time as a family,
as an individual, just seeking out the food
that they need
and not have as much time to invest,
invest in their education and invest in building
assets.
So, we really need to address this.
We need to double down on key investments
in these very tough places.
The first two waves are also instructive in
terms of what these investments should look like.
 
Let's start with the investments in the people,
primarily in their health and education.
China set a great example here.
In 1990, one in three Chinese children were
chronically malnourished,
which means that not only physically but also
mentally
they never fully developed,
they did not achieve their potential.
And the typical Chinese youth never got into
high school.
Well, since then, China has solved that malnutrition
problem,
and in education now, almost all students
not only graduate from high school,
a very high percentage, almost half, attend
college.
You just look at those cities in China and
you see,
wow, something miraculous came out of those human capital investments.
And so, to create this third wave of poverty
reduction,
sub-Saharan Africa's young need the same level
of investment in their human capital.
Of course, the size of that investment is
going to be very large,
because of this population growth, the doubling
in their youth population by 2050.
In sub-Saharan Africa for this youthful generation
we need to get a lot of resources there
and help those countries build these systems.
Our partner, the Institute for Health Metrics
and Evaluation,
did these poverty projections on the continent,
considering a couple of scenarios where the
key thing we varied
was the investment level in human capital.
And so, the status quo shows that the absolute
number of people in extreme poverty
will go up by about 50 million by 2050.
That's disappointing.
Even more sobering, though,
is if we look at what some donors have talked
about doing in terms of disengaging,
we look at governments not continuing to improve,
there you get a very dire situation where
the number almost doubles,
it gets up to 672 million.
But we also took a scenario,
the one we believe in, the one we all want
to rally around,
where we increase that human capital investment,
where we improve those health systems and
those primary and secondary schools,
and there we're able to drive that extreme
poverty down
by over 90 million from where we stand today.
So, the gap between the bad scenario and the
good scenario
is over a factor of two, almost 400 million
people.
So that's really what's at stake.
With the right innovation, which is the most
powerful force in the world,
I really believe it's possible, we might be
able to do even better than that.
You know, a great example of this
was what a discussion like this would have
been about India back in the 1960s.
The yield for wheat, which was very, very
meager,
was changed by modern technology and techniques,
and now we're at almost four times the productivity.
That’s another innovation we need to bring
to Africa,
but innovation can appear in many, many different
sectors.
And so, we need some great innovations.
Soil maps, how we can pick the right fertilizer,
digital technology
to help us understand what's going on with
malnutrition and help solve that.
Education and how by getting reading resources
out there to kids,
their natural curiosity will let them help
develop the key skills.
And so, it's by investing in this innovation
and backing young innovators across sub-Saharan
Africa
we can get a very positive scenario.
I do remember what it was like to be rebellious
and have new ideas.
I waited until my parents were asleep,
and I snuck out of the house in the middle
of the night
to go up and use a computer in the University
of Washington's physics department.
There were a few hours in the middle of the
night when the graduate students weren't there,
and I could have a few hours on this big,
amazing machine.
I would do anything to get my hands on it
and try out to see what the magic of software
could do.
And that's the kind of rebelliousness or new
thinking
that I'm hoping we can tap into today.
The natural desire of youth to change things
and make the world better.
The world we want,
a world in which every person can dream of
a better future and make it come true,
is a world without extreme poverty.
Thank you!
