Cost of conflicts: For a billion people, extreme poverty has not come down in 15 years

Living in areas with lingering conflict comes with many life-long stifling punishments, even if one survives the violence, said the World Bank in a report Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations: Intertwined Crises, Multiple Vulnerabilities released on June 27, 2025.

Losing life expectancy to high infant and maternal mortality and severe food insecurity, some one billion people residing in 39 economies (countries, territories) in fragile and conflict situations have not experienced an easing in their extreme poverty levels in the last 15 years.

“In developing economies in general, the extreme-poverty rate has been whittled down to single digits — just 6 per cent. In economies facing conflict or instability, however, the rate is nearly 40 per cent,” the World Bank noted in the assessment.

The financial institution has assessed these 39 countries / territories in long-standing fragile and conflict situations. Though most of the countries are in sub-Saharan Africa, they are also in East Asia and Pacific and the Middle East (West Asia) and North Africa regions.

“Once they get started, conflicts tend to be persistent — and their economic effects are both grave and long-lasting, the research shows. Half of economies facing conflict or instability today have faced those conditions for 15 years or more,” said the Bank assessment.

These countries — grouped by the Bank as economies in fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS) — are reporting increasingly more conflicts with higher severity since the 2000s. The number of individual conflict events and conflict-related fatalities has more than tripled since the turn of the millennium, with most of the increase having occurred since around 2010, showed the analysis by the Bank. Some notable in this group are countries / territories like Ethiopia, Sudan, Ukraine and the West Bank and Gaza.

Indermit Gill, chief economist of the World Bank Group, said while the world attention is on Ukraine and the Middle East, “Yet, more than 70 per cent of people suffering from conflict and instability are Africans. Untreated, these conditions become chronic.”

In the near future, this group of countries will be home to the largest portion of the world’s extreme poor. “By 2030, FCS economies are projected to account for nearly 60 per cent of the world’s extreme poor,” the Bank observed in the assessment.

Currently, FCS countries have 421 million people living in extreme poverty, which is more than the rest of the world combined. Nearly 40 per cent of the population in these countries are extremely poor, or live on less than $3 per day.

According to the Bank’s assessment, 1 per cent increase in conflict-related fatalities per million population will wipe off around 3.7 per cent of per capita GDP after five years. “High-intensity conflicts — those that kill more than 150 out of every 1 million people at onset — are typically followed by a cumulative drop of about 20 per cent in GDP per capita after five years, relative to pre-conflict projections,” said the Bank.

“Food insecurity has also surged alongside worsening conflict, with about 18 per cent of the FCS population — around 200 million people — currently experiencing acute food insecurity, compared with just 1 per cent in other emerging market and developing economies.” It means food insecurity in FCS countries is 18 times that of developing countries.

Further, infant mortality rates are more than twice as high, showed the Bank assessment.

Expectedly, these countries report low life expectancy in comparison to others. The Bank assessment has attributed this to the lingering fragility and conflict situations. “At 64, average life expectancy in economies suffering from conflict or instability is seven years lower than in other developing economies,” the Bank said.