The world is on course to halve extreme poverty by 2015, but Africa will fall far short of the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday.
A new report by the global institutions also warned that urgent action was needed to tackle climate change, which threatens to exact a hefty toll on particularly poor countries and reverse progress in fighting poverty.
The 2008 Global Monitoring Report, released ahead of the IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington this weekend, said strong economic growth in much of the developing world had contributed to the decline in global poverty.
It said the number of extreme poor — those living under $1 a day — declined by 278 million between 1990 and 2004, and by 150 million in the last five years of that period.
Globally about 1 billion people still live in extreme poverty, the report added.