State of the World

Poverty

Worldwide, one in eight people were living in extreme poverty in 2012, while 10% of the world’s workers and their families were living on less than $1.90 a day in 2015.

Hunger

Almost 800 million people still go hungry, with more than half of the adult population in sub-Saharan Africa facing moderate or severe food shortages in 2015. Meanwhile, an estimated 158.6 million children worldwide under 5 had stunted growth in 2014.

Health & Well-Being

An estimated 5.9 million children under 5 died in 2015, mostly from preventable causes. The same year, 2.1 million people became infected with HIV, and almost half of the world’s population was at risk of malaria with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for roughly 89% of the cases.

Education

Some 59 million children of primary school age did not attend class in 2013, while 757 million people over the age of 15 remained illiterate, two-thirds of them women.

Gender Equality

More than one in four girls worldwide marry before they are 18, while in 30 countries, one-third of females 15 to 19 have undergone genital mutilation.

Water and Sanitation

More than 2 billion people lack regular access to water, and around the same number has access to only poor sanitation. Of these, some 946 million don’t have toilet facilities and continue to practice open defecation.

Energy

Around 1.1 billion people live without electricity, while in 2014 more than 40% of the world’s population was cooking with fuels considered unhealthy and that worsen air quality. The majority with access to electricity worldwide are urban dwellers.

Work and Economic Growth

The average annual growth rate of real gross domestic product per capita in the least developed countries declined to 2.6% from 2010 to 2014. Women are twice as likely as men to be unemployed in Western Asia and Northern Africa. Meanwhile, some 2 billion people don’t have bank accounts.

Climate

Around 83,000 people died and 211 million were affected annually by natural disasters from 2000 to 2013. But in 2015 only 83 countries reportedly had any laws or regulations or managing disaster risk.

Peace and Justice

The murder rate in developing countries from 2008 to 2014 was twice that of developed countries, and young people are “over-represented among direct and indirect victims of violence,” according to the report. Annually, about 200,000 of the world’s homicides involve people ages 10 to 29. In 2011, 34% of the victims of human trafficking globally were children, up from 13% in 2004. And 30% of the people jailed between 2012 and 2014 had still not been sentenced.