The battle against child poverty faces mounting challenges, UNICEF has revealed, as over 417 million children worldwide continue to live without basic needs such as education, clean water, nutritious food, and safe housing. According to the agency, progress in lifting children out of extreme poverty is slowing, leaving many vulnerable to long-term health, social, and developmental consequences.
UNICEF’s The State of the World’s Children 2025: Ending Child Poverty – Our Shared Imperative highlights the groups most at risk. Children under five bear the greatest burden, with more than 22 per cent living in extreme monetary poverty in 2024, while the figure for teenagers is 15 per cent.
Children with disabilities, those in rural areas, displaced or refugee children, and indigenous populations face additional barriers to survival and opportunity.
Household education levels strongly affect child poverty. The report shows that 33 per cent of children whose parents have no formal education live in extreme poverty, compared to just 5.8 per cent when the household head has a university degree.
"Poverty violates children’s fundamental rights.
In a world where hundreds of millions of children continue to suffer deprivations, children’s rights in areas like education, housing, and sanitation, as set out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, are not being fully realised," UNICEF stresses in the report.
Children are over twice as likely as adults to live in extreme poverty. Their developing bodies and minds make them especially susceptible to the lasting impacts of deprivation.
Globally, 118 million children experience three or more severe deprivations, while 17 million endure four or more.
The most common challenge is access to sanitation, with 65 per cent of children in low-income countries lacking toilets, compared with 26 per cent in lower-middle-income countries and 11 per cent in upper-middle-income nations.
“Children growing up in poverty and deprived of essentials like good nutrition, proper sanitation and shelter, face devastating consequences for their health and development,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “It doesn’t have to be this way. When governments commit to ending child poverty by implementing effective policies, they can unlock a world of possibilities for children,” he added.
Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia remain home to the majority of children living in extreme poverty, representing nearly nine out of ten, despite accounting for just over half of the global child population. In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than half of children are affected, with fragile and conflict-hit states experiencing the highest rates.
Other regions, including East Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America, also face high poverty levels, with over one in three children affected. Around 50 million children in high-income countries live in relative poverty, restricting their access to quality education and opportunities.
Some countries have made remarkable gains. Tanzania reduced multidimensional child poverty by 46 percentage points from 2000 to 2023 through government cash grants and initiatives empowering poor households.
Bangladesh achieved a 32 percentage point drop by expanding education, improving housing, boosting electricity access, and investing in water and sanitation, reducing open defecation from 17 per cent in 2000 to zero by 2022.
Despite these successes, global progress is fragile. The COVID-19 pandemic added 20 million children to extreme poverty in one year, and declining international aid threatens to keep six million children out of school while causing millions of preventable deaths.
UNICEF emphasizes that policies prioritizing cash support, education, healthcare, sanitation, and family income security can dramatically reduce child poverty.
