ISLAMABAD (The Thursday Times) — Poverty in Pakistan rose to 28.9% in 2024-25, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal has acknowledged, wiping out most of the gains of the previous decade, as the government weighs changing the way it measures deprivation.
Official figures show national monetary poverty had fallen from 29.5% in 2013-14 to 24.3% in 2015-16 and 21.9% in 2018-19. The latest estimate reflects “a substantial reversal” of that progress, Iqbal said on Wednesday at the signing of an agreement with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford.
“The political instability, policy discontinuity, economic crises and climate shocks reversed development gains,” he said, adding that political stability, sustained growth and continuity in development priorities were needed to get poverty reduction back on track.
Climate shocks and constituency maps
Under the agreement, the planning ministry and OPHI will look at updating Pakistan’s Multidimensional Poverty Index, which now measures health, education and living standards. Officials told The Express Tribune that OPHI has proposed adding climate shocks, demographic pressure and new barriers to opportunity. The two sides will also explore poverty analysis for each National and Provincial Assembly constituency using 2023 census data. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics has already produced a constituency-wise analysis, the officials said, but the government has not decided whether to publish it because of its political implications.
Earlier poverty mapping identified Pakistan’s 20 poorest districts: 11 in Balochistan, five in Sindh, three in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and one in Punjab.
‘Borrowed and stunted’
Iqbal has recently broken ranks over the government’s economic course. In a letter to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, he described the current stabilisation as “borrowed and stunted” and warned: “The greatest danger is that Pakistan may successfully stabilise at a structurally low rate of economic growth.” He has pointed out that the federal development budget is still about Rs1 trillion, roughly the same in nominal terms as in 2017-18, when it made up 19.6% of the federal budget. Had that share been kept, it would now exceed Rs3 trillion, he said.
Growth slowed to 2% in the April-June quarter, below population growth of about 2.6%. The World Bank recently estimated that one in every two of the poorest people across the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan region lives in Pakistan.
