The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Poverty is a lack of income, assets and basic capabilities; inequality is how unevenly resources and opportunities are spread between people and groups. Shocks such as disasters, price spikes and pandemics push people into poverty and widen gaps, while recovery is often slower for the poor. This page sets out how poverty and inequality are measured and how they respond to shocks, and what evidence serves the governments and agencies working to reduce them.
GCRI · In development · service level R0
Poverty and inequality are the lack of income, assets and basic capabilities and the uneven spread of resources and opportunities across people and groups. Shocks push households near the poverty line below it, deprivations overlap and persist across generations, and disaggregated data show the groups that averages hide.
For poverty and inequality, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on population density and true-colour imagery with true colour from NASA GIBS, framed on Latin America and the Caribbean; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.
The interactive map needs JavaScript; the layer list and sources are below.
Layers 2
People and exposure, for this page
Keyboard, with the map focused
Hold Ctrl or ⌘ and scroll to zoom
Latest available
NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · Blue Marble (NASA) · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · Natural Earth
Loading the latest NASA imagery.
Drag to move. Ctrl or ⌘ and scroll, pinch or the buttons to zoom; hover for the values under the pointer; reset returns to the region.
For poverty and inequality, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on population density and true-colour imagery with true colour from NASA GIBS, framed on Latin America and the Caribbean; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date; indicators, not assessments of any place; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.
Layers and dates
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Exposure, distribution and social protection. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.
Many households live just above a poverty line. Illness, job loss, a failed harvest or a price spike can push them below it, and recovery can take years.
Poor households often lack several things at once: income, education, health, water and housing. Measuring only income misses these overlapping deprivations.
Poor nutrition, missed schooling and lack of assets in childhood reduce earnings later, passing disadvantage on.
Inequality often follows gender, ethnicity, disability, location and migration status, which averages hide unless data are disaggregated.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Poverty line | A threshold of income or consumption below which a person is counted as poor. |
| Gini index | A measure of inequality ranging from zero, perfect equality, to one hundred, maximal inequality. |
| Multidimensional poverty | Poverty measured through overlapping deprivations in health, education and living standards. |
Each indicator carries its unit, its cadence, the kind of source behind it and the evidence label a value would carry. No values are shown: a programme supplies them under its own authority.
| Indicator | Unit | Cadence | Source type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Population below the international poverty line | percent of population | per survey | Household surveys compiled in the Poverty and Inequality Platform | ESTIMATED |
| Multidimensional poverty headcount | percent of population | per survey | Global MPI | ESTIMATED |
| Gini index of income or consumption | index | per survey | Household surveys | ESTIMATED |
| Income share of the bottom forty percent | percent of total income | per survey | Household surveys | ESTIMATED |
| Social protection coverage | percent of population covered by at least one benefit | per assessment | ILO World Social Protection data | OFFICIAL |
| Poverty rates disaggregated by sex, age and disability | percent by group | per survey | Household surveys | ESTIMATED |
The topic as a computational graph: named sources feed the methods, an evidence review gates the outputs, and the decisions stay with the authorities that hold them.
Fig. 02Nodes carry their type, two metric rows and a state; connectors show what feeds what; dashed frames name the owners; the timeline is the cadence. Design of the pipeline, not a record of a run.
Named public datasets and institutional records, each with its licence class. Sources by agreement are used only under their terms and never republished.
| Source | What it gives | Licence class |
|---|---|---|
| World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform | Poverty and inequality estimates from household surveys | Open, CC BY 4.0 |
| UNDP and OPHI Global Multidimensional Poverty Index | Overlapping deprivations by country and region | Public, terms per publisher |
| ILO World Social Protection data | Coverage of social protection | Open, CC BY 4.0 |
| World Inequality Database | Income and wealth distribution series | Open, CC BY 4.0 |
| DHS and MICS household surveys | Deprivations in health, education and living conditions | Free with registration, survey terms |
Society and Human Development prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.
| Who decides | The question | Evidence this page serves |
|---|---|---|
| Ministries of social development and finance | Where and how to target poverty reduction | Profiles; small-area maps |
| Social protection agencies | Who should be covered and how support should scale in shocks | Vulnerability analyses; coverage data |
| Statistics offices | How to improve poverty measurement and disaggregation | Data gap evidence |
Poverty is multidimensional: income, but also health, education, housing, water, sanitation and security. Poor households tend to be more exposed because land and housing in safe locations cost more, and more vulnerable because a given loss represents a larger share of what they own. When a shock hits, households cope by drawing on savings, borrowing, selling assets, migrating for work or reducing consumption. Some strategies are reversible; others, such as selling productive assets or withdrawing children from school, reduce future income.
Research on poverty dynamics identifies thresholds below which households cannot rebuild, creating traps. Inequality matters beyond individual hardship: unequal societies tend to invest less in shared protection, and the same aggregate shock produces larger human losses. Social protection, including cash transfers, public works, pensions and social insurance, reduces these effects, particularly when systems can scale up quickly after a shock.
Gender and life stage cut across income. Women, children and older people often face distinct risks within the same household, from unequal control of resources to care burdens that rise in crises, which is why analysis increasingly looks inside households rather than treating them as single units.
Income, consumption and asset surveys measure poverty; they are infrequent and miss mobile and informal populations.
Combining surveys, census and satellite data to map poverty; models can blur local differences.
Experimental and quasi-experimental methods test what social protection achieves; results may not transfer across contexts.
Limits: monetary poverty lines capture only part of deprivation, intra-household inequality is hard to observe, and data on the poorest are often the weakest.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.