Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.uz) — Countries across Asia and the Pacific have made remarkable strides over the past three decades in tackling poverty through a combination of economic growth, government-led programmes and community-based initiatives.
At the same time, the nature of poverty and vulnerability is evolving as climate change, population ageing, digital transformation and recurring economic shocks reshape who is poor, how people experience deprivation and their exposure to future risks. But we have the tools and evidence to address these challenges.
We have myriad examples from across the region: Universal health coverage in Thailand cut out-of-pocket health spending and infant mortality, with the largest gains for the poorest households. Nepal nearly halved child stunting through coordinated nutrition policy, despite limited economic growth. China established targeted employment assistance mechanisms for people in vulnerable situations to broaden their employment channels.
Additionally, Malaysia is expanding access to childcare and eldercare through public investment, community-based services and financial incentives. Mongolia supports unpaid family caregivers through a government-funded care allowance. Cooperatives from Cambodia, India, Kiribati and Viet Nam are already showing how community-owned, participatory models can generate income and resilience, especially in rural areas.
These actions have helped the region to record one of the most significant success stories in modern human development. Driven primarily by economic growth, extreme poverty, the reality for roughly half of the region’s population only 30 years ago, has fallen to just 4 per cent in 2024, with hundreds of millions of people being lifted out of acute deprivation. Yet this headline figure masks a significant reality: 190 million people continue to live in extreme poverty; nearly 500 million people are multidimensionally poor while 660 million are vulnerable to multidimensional poverty.
Considering hybrid poverty lines that reflect what a dignified life actually costs in each country, the trends are even starker: more than 1.1 billion people live in poverty in 2026, an additional 1.2 billion people live above but very close to their respective poverty lines and 310 million people are classified as extremely poor. People are deprived not only of income, but of adequate housing, education, nutrition or social protection. More critically, millions remain one shock away from falling, or slipping deeper, into poverty.
Because so many drivers of poverty cross borders, regional cooperation is not optional but essential. Through regional public goods such as the Leaving No One Behind Platform, the Social Protection Online Toolbox, the Risk and Resilience Platform and the SDG Gateway, we help translate shared regional knowledge into nationally adapted, evidence-based policy, while platforms such as the ESCAP Action Plan to Strengthen Regional Cooperation on Social Protection allow governments to facilitate knowledge exchange and scale policy approaches. And because government action alone cannot close the gap, the private sector and civil society organizations have a critical role to play too, through inclusive business models that reach people in vulnerable situations.
Our study, the Social Outlook 2026, highlights three transitions unfolding simultaneously, climate change, digital transformation and rapid population ageing, that are reshaping who is vulnerable. Extreme climate events are destroying working hours equivalent to millions of jobs and reducing agricultural yields, adversely impacting food security. The region is ageing faster than any other in human history, moving from an ageing to an aged society. And while digital technologies have already lifted people out of poverty by expanding access to markets, finance and services, the digital divide continues to exclude the most vulnerable, who are also the most exposed to automation and face existing labour market disadvantages.
Moreover, the ongoing crisis in Western Asia has already disrupted energy and fertilizer markets, trade routes and remittance flows across our wider region, amplifying inflation especially for households who have the least room to absorb it. This follows the cost-of-living crisis, and before that, the pandemic, each shock striking a population still recovering from the last. These overlapping crises underscore a stark reality: progress against poverty is reversible, placing the region at risk of a lost decade for inclusive development.
The report not only measures poverty and analyses its drivers, it also reshapes our understanding of who is poor and why. Poverty in our region concentrates, again and again, among large rural households and in remote areas, among people with little or no education, among children, among informal workers and among women bearing a disproportionate share of unpaid care work. In the 25 countries studied with ESCAP’s Leaving No One Behind algorithm, disaggregation of monetary and multidimensional poverty using household surveys found that the intersection of multiple disadvantages, rather than one disadvantage alone, defined those furthest behind in unique ways. Understanding these overlapping country-specific disadvantages is essential to designing tailored policies that address the interconnected barriers that trap people in poverty.
Integrated investments in human capital, health coverage, decent work and social protection underpinned by gender-responsive, disability-inclusive and age-sensitive policies are key anchors of one agenda: empowering people and eradicating poverty across our region. We have the blueprint and the Asia-Pacific region has already proven it can reduce poverty at a scale and speed unmatched elsewhere in the world. What is required now is coordinated action to apply it at scale.
The evidence base for action is strong and sustained progress depends on coherent strategies that align economic, social and environmental objectives, strengthen institutions and expand people’s capabilities and resilience over the life course.
The question the Social Outlook 2026 puts before us is whether we will make one final big push to finish the job by 2030 or keep a business-as-usual mindset and allow the next shock to undo progress.
By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)