Losing the battle against extreme poverty

 The global target of ending extreme poverty (living on less than $1.90 a day) by 2030 is unlikely to be met, the World Bank said.

 Without significant shifts in policy, about 480 million people - some 6 percent of the world - will remain in extreme poverty in 2030, the majority in poor African countries which are lagging behind, it said in a forecast document.

Ending extreme poverty by 2030 is a key target among 17 ambitious global development goals agreed at the United Nations (U.N.) in 2015. But at least 10 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa will remain in extreme poverty by 2030 "under all but the most optimistic scenarios", the bank said. The world is not giving enough aid - with many countries missing a U.N. target of spending 0.7 percent of economic output on aid - or directing it towards those most in need, the London-based Overseas Development Institute think tank said last week.

"Middle-income countries get 10 times the amount of aid that low-income countries do and that clearly isn't a sensible way to give aid," the report's author Marcus Manuel told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "We need to flip that."