In 2025, nearly 11.7 percent of the world population in extreme poverty, with the poverty threshold at 2.15 U.S. dollars a day, lived in Nigeria. Moreover, the Democratic Republic of the Congo accounted for around 11.7 percent of the global population in extreme poverty. Other African nations with a large poor population were Tanzania, Mozambique, and Madagascar. Poverty levels remain high despite the forecast decline Poverty is a widespread issue across Africa. Around 429 million people on the continent were living below the extreme poverty line of 2.15 U.S. dollars a day in 2024. Since the continent had approximately 1.4 billion inhabitants, roughly a third of Africa’s population was in extreme poverty that year. Mozambique, Malawi, Central African Republic, and Niger had Africa’s highest extreme poverty rates based on the 2.15 U.S. dollars per day extreme poverty indicator (updated from 1.90 U.S. dollars in September 2022). Although the levels of poverty on the continent are forecast to decrease in the coming years, Africa will remain the poorest region compared to the rest of the world. Prevalence of poverty and malnutrition across Africa Multiple factors are linked to increased poverty. Regions with critical situations of employment, education, health, nutrition, war, and conflict usually have larger poor populations. Consequently, poverty tends to be more prevalent in least-developed and developing countries worldwide. For similar reasons, rural households also face higher poverty levels. In 2024, the extreme poverty rate in Africa stood at around 45 percent among the rural population, compared to seven percent in urban areas. Together with poverty, malnutrition is also widespread in Africa. Limited access to food leads to low health conditions, increasing the poverty risk. At the same time, poverty can determine inadequate nutrition. Almost 38.3 percent of the global undernourished population lived in Africa in 2022.

In 2024, the ratio of government expenditure to GDP in Ethiopia was estimated at about 9.54 percent. Between 1980 and 2024, the figure dropped by approximately 3.96 percentage points, though the decline followed an uneven course rather than a steady trajectory. From 2024 to 2030, the ratio will rise by around 3.96 percentage points, showing an overall upward trend with periodic ups and downs.Shown here is the general government expenditure as a share of the national gross domestic product. As defined by the International Monetary Fund, the general government expenditure consists of total expense and the net acquisition of nonfinancial assets. The gross domestic product represents the total value of final goods and services produced during a year.

Abstract

The Ethiopia Socioeconomic Panel Survey (ESPS) is a collaborative project between the Ethiopian Statistical Service (ESS) and the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) team. The objective of the LSMS-ISA is to collect multi-topic, household-level panel data with a special focus on improving agriculture statistics and generating a clearer understanding of the link between agriculture and other sectors of the economy. The project also aims to build capacity, share knowledge across countries, and improve survey methodologies and technology. ESPS is a long-term project to collect panel data. The project responds to the data needs of the country, given the dependence of a high percentage of households on agriculture activities in the country. The ESPS collects information on household agricultural activities along with other information on the households like human capital, other economic activities, and access to services and resources. The ability to follow the same households over time makes the ESPS a new and powerful tool for studying and understanding the role of agriculture in household welfare over time as it allows analyses of how households add to their human and physical capital, how education affects earnings, and the role of government policies and programs on poverty, inter alia. The ESPS is the first-panel survey to be carried out by the Ethiopian Statistical Service that links a multi-topic household questionnaire with detailed data on agriculture.

Geographic coverage

National Regional Urban and Rural

Analysis unit

• Household
• Individual
• Community

Universe

The survey covered all de jure households excluding prisons, hospitals, military barracks, and school dormitories.

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

The sampling frame for the second phase ESPS panel survey is based on the updated 2018 pre-census cartographic database of enumeration areas by the Ethiopian Statistical Service (ESS). The sample is a two-stage stratified probability sample. The ESPS EAs in rural areas are the subsample of the AgSS EA sample. That means the first stage of sampling in the rural areas entailed selecting enumeration areas (i.e., the primary sampling units) using simple random sampling (SRS) from the sample of the 2018 AgSS enumeration areas (EAs). The first stage of sampling for urban areas is selecting EAs directly from the urban frame of EAs within each region using systematic PPS. This is designed to automatically result in a proportional allocation of the urban sample by zone within each region. Following the selection of sample EAs, they are allocated by urban rural strata using power allocation which is happened to be closer to proportional allocation.

The second stage of sampling is the selection of households to be surveyed in each sampled EA using systematic random sampling. From the rural EAs, 10 agricultural households are selected as a subsample of the households selected for the AgSS, and 2 non-agricultural households are selected from the non-agriculture households list in that specific EA. The non-agriculture household selection follows the same sampling method i.e., systematic random sampling. One important issue to note in ESPS sampling is that the total number of agriculture households per EA remains at 10 even though there are less than 2 or no non-agriculture households are listed and sampled in that EA. For urban areas, a total of 15 households are selected per EA regardless of the households’ economic activity. The households are selected using systematic random sampling from the total households listed in that specific EA.

The ESPS-5 kept all the ESPS-4 samples except for those in the Tigray region and a few other places. A more detailed description of the sample design is provided in Section 3 of the Basic Information Document provided under the Related Materials tab.

Mode of data collection

Computer Assisted Personal Interview [capi]

Research instrument

The ESPS-5 survey consisted of four questionnaires (household, community, post-planting, and post-harvest questionnaires), similar to those used in previous waves but revised based on the results of those waves and on the need for new data they revealed. The following new topics are included in ESPS-5:

a. Dietary Quality: This module collected information on the household’s consumption of specified food items.

b. Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES): In this round the survey has implemented FIES. The scale is based on the eight food insecurity experience questions on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale | Voices of the Hungry | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (fao.org).

c. Basic Agriculture Information: This module is designed to collect minimal agriculture information from households. It is primarily for urban households. However, it was also used for a few rural households where it was not possible to implement the full agriculture module due to security reasons and administered for urban households. It asked whether they had undertaken any agricultural activity, such as crop farming and tending livestock) in the last 12 months. For crop farming, the questions were on land tenure, crop type, input use, and production. For livestock there were also questions on their size and type, livestock products, and income from sales of livestock or livestock products.

d. Climate Risk Perception: This module was intended to elicit both rural and urban households perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes about different climate-related risks. It also asked where and how households were obtaining information on climate and weather-related events.

e. Agriculture Mechanization and Video-Based Agricultural Extension: The rural area community questionnaire covered these areas rural areas. On mechanization the questions related to the penetration, availability and accessibility of agricultural machinery. Communities were also asked if they had received video-based extension services.

Cleaning operations

Final data cleaning was carried out on all data files. Only errors that could be clearly and confidently fixed by the team were corrected; errors that had no clear fix were left in the datasets. Cleaning methods for these errors are left up to the data user.

Response rate

ESPS-5 planned to interview 7,527 households from 565 enumeration areas (EAs) (Rural 316 EAs and Urban 249 EAs). However, due to the security situation in northern Ethiopia and to a lesser extent in the western part of the country, only a total of 4999 households from 438 EAs were interviewed for both the agriculture and household modules. The security situation in northern parts of Ethiopia meant that, in Tigray, ESPS-5 did not cover any of the EAs and households previously sampled. In Afar, while 275 households in 44 EAs had been covered by both the ESPS-4 agriculture and household modules, in ESPS-5 only 252 households in 22 EAs were covered by both modules. During the fifth wave, security was also a problem in both the Amhara and Oromia regions, so there was a comparable reduction in the number of households and EAs covered there.

More detailed information is available in the BID.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic impacted East Africa's poverty level. Extreme poverty rate in the region increased from ** percent in 2019 to ** percent in 2021. South Sudan and Brurundi had the highest share of population living on less than **** U.S. dollars per day, ** percent and ** percent, respectively.

The gini index in Zambia was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2029 by in total 0.01 points (+1.75 percent). The gini is estimated to amount to 0.58 points in 2029. The Gini coefficient here measures the degree of income inequality on a scale from 0 (=total equality of incomes) to one (=total inequality).The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in more than 150 countries and regions worldwide. All input data are sourced from international institutions, national statistical offices, and trade associations. All data has been are processed to generate comparable datasets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).Find more key insights for the gini index in countries like Ethiopia and Uganda.

According to the forecast, Africa's total population would reach nearly 2.5 billion by 2050. In 2023, the continent had around 1.36 billion inhabitants, with Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Egypt as the most populous countries. In the coming years, Africa will experience significant population growth and will close the gap significantly with the Asian population by 2100. Rapid population growth The population of Africa has been increasing annually in recent years, growing from around 818 million to over 1.39 billion between 2000 and 2021, respectively. In the same period, the annual growth rate of the population has been constantly set at roughly 2.5 percent, with a peak of 2.62 percent in 2014. The reasons behind this rapid growth are various. One factor is the high fertility rate registered in African countries. In 2021, a woman in Niger had an average of over 6.8 children in her reproductive years, the highest rate on the continent. High fertility resulted in a large young population and partly compensated for the high mortality rate in Africa, leading to fast-paced population growth. High poverty levels Africa’s population is concerned with widespread poverty. In 2024, over 429 million people on the continent are extremely poor and live with less than 2.15 U.S. dollars per day. Globally, Africa is the continent hosting the highest poverty rate. In 2024, the countries of Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo account for around 21 percent of the world's population living in extreme poverty. Nevertheless, poverty in Africa is forecast to decrease in the coming years.