Pakistan's poverty rate rose to 28.9% in fiscal year 2024-25, reversing earlier gains, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal acknowledged at an event in Islamabad.
"The political instability, policy discontinuity, economic crises and climate shocks reversed development gains," Iqbal said. He added that poverty reduction had suffered a serious setback after 2018, with the COVID-19 pandemic and devastating floods also eroding progress.
The event marked the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the planning ministry and the University of Oxford's Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). The two sides are discussing a revision of the Multidimensional Poverty Index, which currently measures deprivation in health, education and living standards.
A new way to measure poverty
According to sources, OPHI has proposed adding demographic pressure, climate shocks and new barriers to opportunity to the yardsticks. Iqbal said an updated national measurement would draw on the ongoing Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey 2026-27 and look at climate vulnerability, insecurity, youth deprivation, gender inequality, digital exclusion and stunting.
A key part of the collaboration is constituency-level poverty analysis for national and provincial assembly seats, using 2023 census data. Officials said the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics has already prepared such an analysis, but the government has not decided to publish it because of its far-reaching implications. Iqbal said it should first be piloted and used to guide targeted public investment, not as a scorecard for elected representatives.
The figures come as a recent World Bank report found that one in every two of the poorest people across the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan lives in Pakistan. Economic growth slowed to 2% in the April-June quarter, below the 2.6% population growth rate.