UNDP Report: 38.3 Percent of Pakistanis Face Multidimensional Poverty, a Rate More Than Double India’s and Bangladesh’s

WASHINGTON: More than a third of Pakistan’s population faces overlapping deprivations in health, education and living standards at the same time, according to a new report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The report places Pakistan’s position as markedly worse than that of its regional neighbours.

Highest rate in the region

The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2026, prepared jointly by the UNDP and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, puts Pakistan’s multidimensional poverty incidence at 38.3 percent, compared with 16.4 percent in India and 14.9 percent in Bangladesh. The intensity of deprivation among Pakistan’s poor stands at 51.7 percent, and a further 12.9 percent of the population is classified as vulnerable to falling into such poverty. Applying the same incidence to the country’s estimated 2024 population produces a figure of about 96.3 million people.

What the index measures

Unlike income-only measures, the index assesses overlapping disadvantages together, including nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and household assets. In Pakistan’s case, education is identified as the largest contributor to deprivation.

An important caveat

The report itself notes that each country’s figures rest on household surveys from different years, so the comparison is not strictly contemporaneous; Pakistan’s data comes from its 2017-18 Demographic and Health Survey. The global picture is also worsening: the number of people in multidimensional poverty has risen for the first time in 15 years, reaching 1.2 billion, more than half of them children, with 83 percent living in rural areas.