The manufacturing of poverty

In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Heads of State and Government and High Representatives stated that they were determined to “end poverty and hunger, in all their forms and dimensions” by 2030 and resolved to “combat inequalities within and among countries”. These pledges will not be fulfilled. More than a tenth of the world’s population, or 845 million people (388 million people in East and Southern Africa alone), still lived in extreme poverty in 2025, and 8.9 per cent of people will still live in extreme poverty by 2030 unless a dramatic change of course occurs.¹ Those figures are optimistic to the point of being misleading, since they rely on the extremely low international poverty line of $3 per day in purchasing power parity. Using the more realistic $8.20 per day in purchasing power parity, 45 per cent of the world’s population, or 3.7 billion people, would be considered to be living in extreme poverty. Using that same measure, 89.3 per cent of the sub-Saharan African population (670 million people) live in extreme poverty today, a rate that has remained unchanged for the past 30 years.² At the same time, 2.3 billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2024. The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis that followed the rise in energy prices in late 2021 and during the first quarter of 2022 increased this figure by 335 million people compared with 2019.³ At the time of writing the present report (March 2026), Governments are bracing for what may be the worst cost-of-living crisis since the great financial crisis, as a result of the energy crisis triggered by the conflict in the Persian Gulf.

1. https://social.desa.un.org/world-summit-2025/blog/the-sustainable-development-goals-have-improved-millions-of-lives-over-the. ↩
2. Using the $8.20 per day poverty line, 53.04 per cent of the world’s population were living in extreme poverty in 2015 (World Bank, “Poverty and inequality indicators”, Poverty and Inequality Platform (accessed on 27 March 2026)). ↩
3. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025 (Rome, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and others, 2025). ↩

Worse, Governments are also facing what has been recognized as an “inequality emergency”: nine in ten people in the world live in countries that meet the World Bank’s threshold for high inequality (Gini coefficient above 0.4), and wealth inequality in particular has risen dramatically over the past 40 years.⁴ In India, the top 10 per cent of earners capture about 58 per cent of national income, while the bottom 50 per cent receive only 15 per cent, and the richest 10 per cent hold around 65 per cent of total wealth (the top 1 per cent owning about 40 per cent).⁵ In the Russian Federation, the richest 10 per cent hold 75 per cent of total wealth, and the top 1 per cent alone hold 47 per cent.⁶ In Mexico, the top 10 per cent of earners capture around 59 per cent of total income, while the bottom half receive only 8 per cent, and wealth inequalities are even larger: the richest 10 per cent hold 71 per cent of total wealth and the top 1 per cent hold about 38 per cent.⁷ In Colombia, which has one of highest income Gini coefficients in the world (0.53),⁸ the top 10 per cent of earners capture 60 per cent of total income, while the bottom 50 per cent receive around 7 per cent, and wealth inequalities are extreme: the richest 10 per cent hold around 71 per cent of total wealth, a situation that has in fact worsened over the past decade.⁹

4. G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality, Report of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality (2025). ↩
5. See https://wir2026.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2025/11/WIR26_Country_Sheets.pdf. ↩
6. Ibid. ↩
7. Ibid. ↩
8. A/HRC/59/51/Add.1, para. 7. ↩
9. See https://wir2026.wid.world/www-site/uploads/2025/11/WIR26_Country_Sheets.pdf. ↩

The growth of income and wealth inequalities within countries is a ticking bomb. By reducing social mobility and making it more difficult for the poorest groups to overcome disadvantage, such inequalities transform societies that pride themselves on being “meritocratic” into caste-based societies; a betrayal of the ideal of equal opportunities that has far-reaching political consequences.¹⁰ Indeed, it should come as no surprise that countries such as Brazil, Colombia and South Africa are taking the lead in the global fight against inequalities. In these countries with high inequality and low social mobility, it takes nine generations or more for those born in low-income families to approach the mean income in their society unless significant changes occur.¹¹ The Governments of these countries understand, better perhaps than others, the huge costs of inaction because the persistence and, even worse, the growth of inequalities breed discontent and distrust towards the State. Countries with high inequality are seven times more likely to experience democratic decline than more equal countries.¹²

10. A/80/138, para. 29. ↩
11. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility (Paris, 2018), p. 26. ↩
12. Eli G. Rau and Susan Stokes, “Income inequality and the erosion of democracy in the twenty-first century”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 122, No. 1 (January 2025). ↩

Entrenched inequality worsens poverty, which is a relational concept: it is extreme material deprivation, but also the social exclusion of people who cannot meet the norms of behaviour that are expected within the society to which they belong.¹³ Inequality moreover limits opportunities to save, acquire or inherit assets. Particularly when paired with low coverage of social protection, inequality means that people experiencing poverty are rarely able to change their life trajectory. While wealthier households can absorb external and internal shocks through accumulated assets and social networks and access to higher education that lead to better-paid employment, poorer individuals have far fewer options to manage risks or recover from crises, reinforcing the vicious cycles that perpetuate and exacerbate inequality.¹⁴ Inequalities also favour speculation on certain assets, particularly land and housing, from which people living in poverty are priced out.¹⁵

13. A/78/175, para. 39. ↩
14. Olivier De Schutter and others, The Escape from Poverty: Breaking the Vicious Cycles Perpetuating Disadvantage (Bristol, Policy Press, 2023). ↩
15. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, general comment No. 26 (2022), para. 2 (a) and (b). ↩

Poverty and inequalities are manufactured. While catastrophic for the victims experiencing exclusion, they are not natural disasters: Governments can choose to address them before they happen. In what follows, the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights sets out his understanding of the challenge. He explains the role of anti-poverty strategies in this regard and he introduces, as a contribution to the agenda for change, the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth.¹⁶

16. See A/HRC/62/42/Add.2. ↩

The most obvious response to the twin challenges of persistent poverty and rising inequality is to combine progressive taxation and redistribution through the provision of public services and social protection.

During his tenure, the Special Rapporteur put forward a number of recommendations in that regard. He supported the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in emphasizing the importance of aligning tax policy with the realization of economic and social rights such as the right to housing, to food, to education, to healthcare and to social security.¹⁷ He insisted that more support should go to developing countries, and to low-income countries in particular, to help them establish social protection floors, consistent with the International Labour Organization (ILO) Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (No. 202).¹⁸ He presented the case for providing long-term and predictable support through a new financing mechanism, the global fund for social protection,¹⁹ and he identified various financing options that could be explored in that regard.²⁰ He urged States to do more to close the gap between legal entitlements (to child allowances, disability benefits, unemployment benefits, old-age pension and minimum income) and effective access to those entitlements, deploring the high rates of non-take-up of social benefits, particularly among households most in need of support.²¹ He encouraged States to adapt social security to the need to improve the protection of people living in poverty against the impacts of climate change.²²

17. See E/C.12/2025/1. ↩
18. See A/HRC/47/36. ↩
19. See A/HRC/47/36; and A/HRC/59/51, annex. ↩
20. See https://www.srpoverty.org/2025/01/17/financing-social-protection-floors-contribution-of-the-special-rapporteur-to-ffd4/. ↩
21. See A/HRC/50/38. ↩
22. See A/HRC/59/51. ↩

The Special Rapporteur repeatedly expressed concern that informal workers were not protected by social insurance mechanisms, while at the same time often failing to qualify for cash transfers benefiting only the most vulnerable, thus falling into the “missing middle”.²³ In 2024, 57.8 per cent of the global workforce, or over 2 billion workers (with an overrepresentation of women), were in the informal sector. In the least developed countries and in sub-Saharan Africa, 90 per cent of workers were in the informal sector.²⁴

23. A/HRC/50/38, paras. 37–41. ↩
24. See https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/files/report/2025/2025_Factsheets.pdf. ↩

Consistent with the ILO Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy Recommendation, 2015 (No. 204), and general comment No. 23 (2016) on the right to just and favourable conditions of work of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (para. 47 (d)), the Special Rapporteur encouraged countries to pursue a three-track approach towards formalization.²⁵ First, the human rights of informal workers should be protected, in order to avoid instances of exploitation by unscrupulous employers. Health and safety at work regulations, minimum wage, union rights and the right to equal treatment should be extended to informal workers and enforced by labour inspectorates. Second, social security should be progressively extended to informal workers, to combat unfair competition from business entities not registering their workers. Third, specific measures should be adopted to ensure the gradual transition to formalization, for instance, where informal workers are provided with some forms of social assistance, formalization should not immediately and automatically lead to exclusion from such support, since the threat of such exclusion could result in a strong disincentive towards formalization. Formalization should also be encouraged by providing incentives to employers who choose to formalize workers, for instance by reducing the levels of social contributions during an initial period following formalization, or by making the award of public contracts or access to credit contingent upon formalization for both the businesses concerned and their subcontractors.

25. See, for example, A/HRC/59/51/Add.1. ↩

This first lever faces a major constraint, however: it requires high levels of economic growth. Under existing institutional arrangements, public revenue is mobilized mostly by taxing economic activity, and the reduction of total economic output may therefore place pressure on public finances, threatening the financing of social protection, especially when it reduces total employment, which may result not only in lower revenues for the State, but also in an increase of public spending on unemployment benefits, in the countries that have such protections in place.²⁶ Moreover, the less total economic output increases, the higher the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) will need to be dedicated to debt servicing, which in many developing countries is a major obstacle to financing social protection. In 2024, developing countries had a total public debt of $31 trillion (and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 54 per cent). In one in three developing countries (home to 3.4 billion people in total), spending on debt servicing already exceeds spending on healthcare or education.²⁷

26. Lorenz Keyßer, Julia Steinberger and Matthias Schmelzer, “Economic growth dependencies and imperatives: A review of key theories and their conflicts”, Ecological Economics, vol. 238 (December 2025). ↩
27. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, A World of Debt: Report 2025 (2025). ↩

As long as economic growth remains a precondition for social progress, Governments are trapped in a dilemma: while growth is needed, it is not sustainable, and the quest for growth risks superseding other objectives. Since the 1970s, Earth scientists have been warning that infinite growth is an unrealistic option on a planet with finite resources and with a limited ability to absorb the waste and pollution caused by the growth of human activity. Dominant, growth-led development models are creating the conditions for what scientists 21 See A/HRC/50/38. 22 See A/HRC/59/51. 23 A/HRC/50/38, paras. 37–41. 24 See https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/files/report/2025/2025_Factsheets.pdf. 25 See, for example, A/HRC/59/51/Add.1. 26 Lorenz Keyßer, Julia Steinberger and Matthias Schmelzer, “Economic growth dependencies and imperatives: A review of key theories and their conflicts”, Ecological Economics, vol. 238 (December 2025). 27 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, A World of Debt: Report 2025 (2025). GE.26-05092 call a “hothouse Earth”: climate change is reaching tipping points which are threatening the very conditions that have supported human civilization for millennia.²⁸ Biodiversity loss is such that it is now described not only as the “sixth extinction of species”, but also as a national security threat.²⁹ Resource extraction and use are responsible for 55 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and land-use changes are responsible for 90 per cent of biodiversity loss, figures that are anticipated to rise by 60 per cent from 2020 levels by³⁰ 2060.30 People living in poverty are the most affected by these environmental crises. They often depend on ecosystems for their livelihoods or live in the most vulnerable areas, and they have the greatest difficulties coping with impacts such as higher food prices, the reduced productivity of outdoor work and the health impacts from climate disruptions or biodiversity loss. They are, moreover, not adequately covered by social protection, while their ability to mobilize savings in times of crisis is severely constrained.³¹

28. William J. Ripple and others, “The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory”, One Earth, vol. 9, No. 2 (February 2026). ↩
29. Michael B. Mahon and others, “A meta-analysis on global change drivers and the risk of infectious disease”, Nature, vol. 629 (2024); and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, “Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security: a national security assessment” (2026). ↩
30. United Nations Environment Programme, Global Resources Outlook 2024: Bend the Trend – Pathways to a Liveable Planet as Resource Use Spikes (Nairobi, 2024). ↩
31. A/HRC/59/51, paras. 8–10. ↩

The failure of Governments to address poverty and inequalities contributes to this environmental collapse. Wealthy elites lead highly carbon-intensive lifestyles and make environmentally destructive investment choices that disproportionately contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions: globally, the wealthiest 10 per cent of the world’s population (two thirds of whom live in high-income regions) contribute around 36–45 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions; by contrast, the lifestyle consumption emissions of the middle-income and poorest citizens in emerging economies are between 5 and 50 times below their counterparts in high-income countries.³² Inequality also encourages status competition, thus fuelling the consumption-driven model of the current global economic system, which relies on the ever-increasing production and purchase of consumer goods. Even more importantly, economies that tolerate high inequality levels are grossly inefficient: such economies extract resources and produce waste and pollution in response to the demand expressed by the segments of the population with the highest purchasing power, neglecting the basic needs of people living in poverty. Where the benefits of growth are unequally spread, countries need to achieve high levels of growth (as measured by an increase in GDP) in order to reduce poverty, which creates a tension between reducing poverty and remaining within planetary boundaries.

32. Shobhakar Dhakal and others, “Emissions trends and drivers”, in Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change –Working Group III Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022), p. 219. ↩

In the 2030 Agenda, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the 169 associated targets are “integrated and indivisible”.³³ The Special Rapporteur has therefore consistently sought to link Goal 1 (End poverty in all its forms everywhere) with the other Goals, including Goal 12 (Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns) and Goal 13 (Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts). To this end, he proposed how to achieve a “just transition”³⁴ and how to eradicate poverty without having to first increase GDP.³⁵ This is also why post-market redistribution (Lever One) should be combined with in-market reforms and pre-market social investment (Levers Two and Three). 28 William J. Ripple and others, “The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory”, One Earth, vol. 9, No. 2 (February 2026). 29 Michael B. Mahon and others, “A meta-analysis on global change drivers and the risk of infectious disease”, Nature, vol. 629 (2024); and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, “Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security: a national security assessment” (2026). 30 United Nations Environment Programme, Global Resources Outlook 2024: Bend the Trend – Pathways to a Liveable Planet as Resource Use Spikes (Nairobi, 2024). 31 A/HRC/59/51, paras. 8–10. 32 Shobhakar Dhakal and others, “Emissions trends and drivers”, in Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change –Working Group III Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022), p. 219. 33 General Assembly resolution 70/1, para. 18. 34 See A/75/181/Rev.1. 35 See A/HRC/56/61. GE.26-05092 B. Levers Two and Three: in-market inclusion and pre-market social investment

33. General Assembly resolution 70/1, para. 18. ↩
34. See A/75/181/Rev.1. ↩
35. See A/HRC/56/61. ↩

Progressive taxation and the strengthening of social protection are thus essential to the fight against poverty. Relying on these tools alone is insufficient, however. Lever One requires striking a balance between targeting support at the poorest households, for instance by proxy means testing, and avoiding the risk of underinclusion. The difficulties that low-income households face in collecting the documentation required to apply for certain benefits or in going through complex application procedures result in high rates of non-take-up of social benefits, and proxy means testing, when it is performed by local officials or social workers, can give rise to discrimination or encourage bribery.³⁶ Moreover, excessive targeting creates a form of anxiety for potential beneficiaries, with measurable mental health impacts.³⁷ It also carries a political cost: the more social support goes only to the poorest households, the less it enjoys broad support across all groups of taxpayers, unless combined with strong conditionalities.³⁸ On various occasions, the Special Rapporteur has noted the deeply problematic distinction between the “deserving poor” and the “non-deserving poor”, from a human rights perspective.³⁹

36. A/HRC/50/38, paras. 49–51 and 65–67. ↩
37. A/79/162, para. 32. ↩
38. A/80/138, paras. 43–45. ↩
39. A/79/162, paras. 31 and 32; and A/80/138, paras. 5–13. ↩

Moreover, post-market compensation (Lever One) is not a substitute for making the economy more inclusive by design (Lever Two) or for addressing the root causes of the perpetuation of poverty across generations (Lever Three). These levers have a key role to play in breaking the cycles of disadvantage and ensuring real equality of opportunities. In Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, at least a quarter of the income market inequalities (before tax and transfers) is attributable to circumstances beyond individuals’ reach, such as persons’ sex, country of birth and, in particular, the socioeconomic background of their parents (their educational level and profession), which explains 60 to 75 per cent of this gap. In countries such as Belgium, Chile, Ireland, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the United States of America, more than 35 per cent of total income inequality is explained by factors unrelated to an individual’s efforts.⁴⁰ A comparison of the evolution of income inequality and equality of opportunity in OECD countries over the past 15 years shows that these countries have been more effective in reducing disparities in outcomes than in addressing long-term barriers to equality of opportunity. In other terms, while these countries compensate the result of market outcomes, they are failing to shape economies to make them truly inclusive. Inequality of opportunity has increased in recent years: even so-called meritocratic societies thus fail to live up to their promise of addressing disadvantage.

40. OECD, To Have and Have Not: How to Bridge the Gap in Opportunities (Paris, 2025), pp. 11 and 48. ↩

An inclusive economy (Lever Two) is one that actively supports access to decent jobs, in particular by combating discrimination on grounds of socioeconomic disadvantage or long-term unemployment,⁴¹ and that strengthens the bargaining position of workers by upholding union rights and guaranteeing the right to a living wage and to fair remuneration. The Special Rapporteur has made concrete proposals in this regard, exploring in particular the factors behind the proliferation of precarious work⁴² and how the establishment of a job guarantee could strengthen the bargaining position of workers.⁴³

41. See A/77/157. ↩
42. See A/78/175. ↩
43. See A/HRC/53/33. ↩

Social investment (lever three) is most effective at breaking the vicious cycles that perpetuate poverty from one generation to the next, by addressing child poverty and investing in areas such as nutrition, adequate housing and quality education. Social investment thus conceived, based on the provision of basic services, could focus efforts on the poorest regions and on disadvantaged neighbourhoods, since it is now well understood that neighbourhood characteristics, such as average household incomes, rates of single-parent households and crime rates, the proximity of role models and social networks and access to green areas, have 36 A/HRC/50/38, paras. 49–51 and 65–67. 37 A/79/162, para. 32. 38 A/80/138, paras. 43–45. 39 A/79/162, paras. 31 and 32; and A/80/138, paras. 5–13. 40 OECD, To Have and Have Not: How to Bridge the Gap in Opportunities (Paris, 2025), pp. 11 and 48. 41 See A/77/157. 42 See A/78/175. 43 See A/HRC/53/33. GE.26-05092 a decisive impact on children’s prospects.⁴⁴ Social investment is particularly important to take into account geographical disparities between regions, which often have their source in weaker infrastructure and lower-quality public services. In Mexico, poverty rates vary tenfold across regions – a gap of around 35 percentage points – and similar disparities are found in Colombia and Italy, where the gap between the regions with the highest and lowest poverty rates exceeds 30 percentage points.⁴⁵

44. See A/76/177. See also Dilip Mookherjee, Debraj Ray and Stefan Napel, “Aspirations, segregation and occupational choice”, Journal of the European Economic Association, vol. 8, No. 4 (January 2010); Vonnie C. McLoyd, Rosanne M. Jocson and Abigail B. Williams, “Linking poverty and children’s development: concepts, models and debates”, in The Oxford Handbook on the Social Science of Poverty, David Brady and Linda M. Burton, eds. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016); John M. Pascoe and others, “Mediators and adverse effects of child poverty in the United States”, Paediatrics, vol. 137, No. 4 (April 2016); and Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, “The effects of neighbourhoods on intergenerational mobility I: childhood exposure effects”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 133, No. 3 (August 2018). ↩
45. OECD, To Have and Have Not, p. 80. ↩

This broader approach – multidimensional, longer term and geographically targeted – is essential to address poverty that is not simply transient (resulting from a sudden loss of income due to a life risk materializing, such as unemployment, illness or a natural disaster), but chronic (linked to poor living conditions and a lack of economic opportunities). It is also essential in order to prevent poverty rather than to simply compensate individuals and households in poverty. It makes no sense, for instance, to pretend to continue to combat poverty through social protection (as is achieved by providing unemployment benefits or social assistance) while encouraging the development of forms of precarious work that provide poverty wages, or to seek to create jobs without combating social segregation in housing that makes it impossible for low-income households to be connected to employment opportunities.

While a comprehensive effort to combat poverty should rely on the three levers, ensuring their complementarity is a major challenge. A human rights-based approach to combating poverty can help in this regard. It should ensure, for example, that any conditionalities attached to social benefits do not result in penalizing people living in poverty⁴⁶ or in increasing rates of non-take-up,⁴⁷ but instead take the form of enforceable rights that beneficiaries may claim to support them in their search for a job, or in having access to training, to better housing conditions or to quality schools that will improve their children’s future prospects. It should also ensure that, to avoid social benefits resulting in a disincentive to work, entry-level wages are increased (rather than benefits reduced) and obstacles to employment (such as the lack of childcare services and high transportation costs) are addressed. The introduction in Spain of a minimum income scheme (ingreso mínimo vital) in 2020 provided a good opportunity to assess the effectiveness of such “cash plus” initiatives. The Inclusion Policy Lab, launched alongside the scheme, involved 200,000 participants across the country in 32 randomized evaluations of pilot programmes and demonstrated the benefits of combining social assistance with measures such as personalized tutoring, job search assistance and assistance in claiming social benefits.⁴⁸

46. A/80/138, paras. 5–13. ↩
47. A/HRC/50/38, para. 55. ↩
48. Laura Guilia Cassio, Addressing Poverty in the EU: Insights from Science and Practice for an AntiPoverty Strategy (Luxembourg, Publications Office of the European Union, 2026), p. 71. ↩

States should adopt anti-poverty strategies based on human rights, involving people living in poverty in their design and implementation and setting targets to be reached within specific time frames.⁴⁹ Such strategies should ideally be anchored in legislation, as has been 44 See A/76/177. See also Dilip Mookherjee, Debraj Ray and Stefan Napel, “Aspirations, segregation and occupational choice”, Journal of the European Economic Association, vol. 8, No. 4 (January 2010); Vonnie C. McLoyd, Rosanne M. Jocson and Abigail B. Williams, “Linking poverty and children’s development: concepts, models and debates”, in The Oxford Handbook on the Social Science of Poverty, David Brady and Linda M. Burton, eds. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016); John M. Pascoe and others, “Mediators and adverse effects of child poverty in the United States”, Paediatrics, vol. 137, No. 4 (April 2016); and Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, “The effects of neighbourhoods on intergenerational mobility I: childhood exposure effects”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 133, No. 3 (August 2018). 45 OECD, To Have and Have Not, p. 80. 46 A/80/138, paras. 5–13. 47 A/HRC/50/38, para. 55. 48 Laura Guilia Cassio, Addressing Poverty in the EU: Insights from Science and Practice for an Anti-Poverty Strategy (Luxembourg, Publications Office of the European Union, 2026), p. 71. 49 Guiding principles on extreme poverty and human rights, para. 50. GE.26-05092 done in Belgium, 50 Bolivia (Plurinational State of),⁵¹ 51 Canada, 52 Colombia 53 and the Philippines.⁵⁴ If well conceived, they can be a crucial tool to ensure that the three levers of the fight against poverty support each other, and to allow countries to move beyond growth dependencies. Based on his country visits and review of a number of national experiences, the Special Rapporteur puts forward the recommendations set out below.

49. Guiding principles on extreme poverty and human rights, para. 50. ↩
51. Act No. 777 of 21 January 2016, available at https://sea.gob.bo/digesto/CompendioII/A/2_L_777.pdf. ↩
54. Act No. 8425 of 1998, available at https://pcw.gov.ph/assets/files/2020/03/republic_act_8425.pdf. ↩

The first challenge is to adequately assess the state of poverty. When poverty measures rely on household surveys, they often leave out persons such as undocumented migrants, people who are homeless and people living in institutions. General measures of poverty, moreover, such as those based on national poverty lines, are not particularly helpful to inform a strategy, even when they are disaggregated by gender, ethnicity, rural and urban divides or age.

Income-based measures of poverty also provide an incomplete picture of deprivation. Poverty measures should, at a minimum, include a multidimensional measurement of poverty, to identify the areas progress in which most progress is needed. The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative relies on a multidimensional poverty index that tracks 12 indicators relating to living standards, education and health, and has already been tested in 109 countries. It was complemented in 2022 by a rural multidimensional poverty index, which takes into account the specific capabilities of people in rural areas by including food security, the quality of nutrition, education and living standards, as well as access to adequate agricultural assets, exposure to environmental and other risks, and social protection.

Comprehensive assessments of poverty should go beyond even such multidimensional approaches. They should measure not only deprivations, but also income and wealth inequalities in order to reflect the social exclusion that results from the inability to meet social expectations, which rise as society becomes more affluent. While the Gini coefficient can be used in this regard, the Palma ratio (the ratio between the share of market incomes received by the richest 10 per cent and the share received by the poorest 40 per cent) or the income quintile share ratio (or S80/S20 ratio: the ratio of the total income of the top quintile to the income of the bottom quintile) are more appropriate to identify changes at the two ends of the income ladder.

Poverty assessments should also contain indicators to measure social mobility – the extent to which the socioeconomic positions of parents have an impact on their children’s prospects in adult life. This can be achieved relatively economically, using an ex ante approach dividing the population into groups of individuals sharing a similar set of circumstances and assessing the average outcomes achieved by these different groups. This should allow for the identification of the background circumstances that are the most penalizing for individuals, and thus the measures that should be taken to level the playing field.⁵⁵

55. OECD, To Have and Have Not, box 1.3. ↩

Finally, such assessments should ensure that the hidden dimensions of poverty, which have their source in relational dynamics (institutional maltreatment, social maltreatment and unrecognized contributions) or that relate to the core experience of poverty by those who are affected (disempowerment, suffering, struggle and resistance), are taken into account and addressed in the national anti-poverty strategy.⁵⁶ In order to capture these hidden dimensions adequately, the diagnosis should be informed not only by research and survey data, but also by the views and lived experiences of people living in poverty, who should therefore be involved from the start, during the diagnostic phase, in the design of the strategy.

56. Rachel Bray and others, “Realising poverty in all its dimensions: a six-country participatory study”, World Development, vol. 134, No. 4 (October 2020). ↩

Based on this initial diagnosis, and again through a participatory process, the national anti-poverty strategy should identify the measures that should be taken to reduce poverty, and the associated time frame; the departments, institutions or social actors responsible for implementation; the sources of funding, especially where financing from the general State budget is to be combined with financing from other sources, such as regional or local governments or private actors; and the indicators to measure progress.

The trans-sectorial dimension of anti-poverty strategies requires inter-ministerial coordination and, in States with a federal structure, coordination with regional entities. Coordination across different sectorial policies is required where policies to combat poverty require increased financing (and thus identification of additional sources of public revenue), or where, conversely, fiscal reforms that could have a regressive impact (such as the introduction of a carbon tax) require compensation to ensure that low-income households will benefit.⁵⁷ Moreover, if the fight against poverty should indeed rely not only on post-market compensation, but also on in-market inclusion and pre-market social investment, focused in particular on early childhood education and care and the provision of public services in areas such as healthcare, education, housing and transport, a range of ministerial departments should be involved in the implementation of the strategy. The follow-up to the National Strategy to Fight against Poverty adopted by Portugal in 2023, which involves 270 measures to lower the risk of poverty and the social exclusion rate to 10 per cent in 2030, is ensured through a high-level interministerial commission.⁵⁸ In France, the interministerial delegation for the prevention of and fight against poverty plays a similar coordinating role.⁵⁹ In Spain, the National Strategy for Preventing and Fighting Poverty and Social Exclusion 2024–2030 is implemented through an interministerial commission. Ireland adopted the Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020–2025, which involves a range of ministerial departments, under the leadership of the Department of Social Protection.

57. On carbon pricing and the requirement of a just transition, see A/75/181/Rev.1, paras. 13–19. ↩
58. See https://portugal.gov.pt/en/gc23/communication/news/national-strategy-to-fight-poverty-government-presents-over-270-measures. ↩
59. Act No. 2017-1488 of 23 October 2017 on the establishment of an interministerial delegation for the prevention of and fight against poverty. ↩

Strengthened coordination is essential to increase support for the care economy. While there is now a growing consensus on the need to better support the care economy, workers in the care economy (including those in education, health and social work, as well as domestic workers) are underpaid, and most care work is still unrecognized, unpaid and performed within households and communities, mostly by women.⁶⁰ This largely explains why women are significantly more at risk of poverty than men: 249 million women worked in the care economy in 2018, compared to 132 million men. It is also mostly women who perform unpaid care work: 76.2 per cent of the total amount of unpaid care work in 2018 was by women, which resulted in 606 million women being unavailable for employment due to their unpaid care work (compared to only 41 million men).⁶¹ This imbalance is made worse by the fact that most single-parent households are headed by women: 84.3 per cent globally, according to one count.⁶² In its advisory opinion 31/25, affirming that the American Convention on Human Rights included a stand-alone human right to care, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights referred to “a structural overload of care responsibilities on women”, negatively impacting the effective enjoyment of their rights, and it concluded that States should adopt specific measures aimed at achieving a more equitable distribution of care and establishing public support systems that recognized, valued and redistributed those tasks.⁶³

60. A/78/175, paras. 50–54. ↩
61. ILO, “Decent work and the care economy”, document ILC.112/Report VI, box 5. ↩
62. United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN-Women), Progress of the World’s Women 2019–2020: Families in a Changing World (New York, 2019), p. 63. ↩
63. The Content and Scope of the Right to Care and its Interrelationship with Other Rights, Advisory Opinion AO-31/25, 12 June 2025, paras. 99 and 203. ↩

The recognition of the right to care – including the right to provide care, to receive care and to take care of oneself – is especially important in the fight against poverty, both because women are disproportionately affected by poverty as a result of their care work being often neither recognized nor remunerated⁶⁴ and because people living in poverty may face obstacles in receiving care when it is unaffordable: low-income families may be unable to provide children with the necessary care, in violation of article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.⁶⁵ Moreover, the undervaluation of care work disproportionately affects migrant workers: 13 per cent of nurses globally (a total of 3.7 million nurses) and 17 per cent of domestic workers are foreign-born or foreign-trained migrant workers; gender discrimination therefore often intersects with ethnicity-based discrimination and with discrimination based on migrant status.⁶⁶

64. See A/68/293. ↩
65. Inter-American Court of Human Rights, The Content and Scope of the Right to Care and its Interrelationship with Other Rights, Advisory Opinion AO-31/25, para. 178. ↩
66. ILO, “Decent work and the care economy”, para. 78. ↩

An intersectoral approach is indispensable to protect the right to care and to ensure that care work is better valued and recognized, as a tool to combat poverty. The establishment in Brazil of an interministerial working group tasked with preparing a national care policy, bringing together 17 ministries, and similar developments in other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and in Asia and the Pacific illustrate this.⁶⁷ In order to move towards a gender-equal care economy, a range of policy areas should be aligned, including employment (for better life-work balance, support to unpaid carers in joining the labour force, care leave policies, and improved valuation of care work); social protection (to improve access to social protection for domestic workers, increase the coverage and adequacy of child benefits and ensure access to quality childcare and to healthcare); migration (to protect migrant care workers’ rights while at the same time avoiding a “brain drain” detrimental to countries of origin);⁶⁸ and climate (to favour the transition from polluting industries to the care economy). A pathway approach, setting time-bound objectives, can also ensure that the recognition of care work goes hand in hand with reducing the burden on women (by the adequate provision of services) and redistribution (by combating gender stereotypes and segregation), as well as with better rewarding care work and improving care workers’ representation by strengthening union rights and collective bargaining: this framework for supporting decent work in the care economy (recognize, reduce, redistribute, reward and represent) thus requires relying on multi-year action plans involving a range of ministries working in close coordination.

67. ILO and Asian Development Bank, Investments in Childcare for Gender Equality in Asia and the Pacific (Geneva and Manila, 2023), chap. 3; and Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, The Care Society: A Horizon for Sustainable Recovery with Gender Equality (Santiago, 2022), chap. VI. ↩
68. World Health Organization, “Global code of practice on the international recruitment of health personnel”, document WHA63.16. ↩

The fight against geographical segregation between socioeconomic groups provides another illustration of the benefits of maximizing synergies across sectorial policies. The “neighbourhood effects” referred to above call for facilitating low-income households’ access to dwellings in more affluent neighbourhoods. Yet, there is a risk that encouraging such mobility will be counterproductive, both for the households concerned (who will lose their social links and perhaps face a hostile environment in their new neighbourhood) and for those who are left behind (as the low-income neighbourhood may lose from such outmigration), unless efforts are made both to facilitate the building of social connections in the new neighbourhood (by investing in “linking” social capital) and to support improvements to the low-income neighbourhood that many are tempted to leave.⁶⁹ Policies aimed at encouraging residential mobility and desegregation should therefore be accompanied by policies aimed at encouraging supportive social connections and by an increase in investment in public services in predominantly poor neighbourhoods. These various initiatives should be coordinated in time: they can be mutually supportive only if conducted in parallel.

69. Boglárka Méreiné-Berki, György Málovics and Remus Creţan, “‘You become one with the place’: social mixing, social capital, and the lived experience of urban desegregation in the Roma community”, Cities, vol. 117 (October 2021). ↩

National anti-poverty strategies serve to improve accountability. Such strategies should include targets that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, allowing opposition political parties, non-governmental organizations, unions and the media to assess progress. These targets should be binding: there is no reason why they should be merely aspirational, especially when progress is gradual and when the targets are considered as achievable across time. While only the revised European Social Charter recognizes a right to be protected from poverty and social exclusion as such,⁷⁰ all human rights instruments acknowledge that certain segments of the population cannot be deprived of human rights for the sole reason that they are poor. Setting binding targets for the eradication of extreme poverty, as well as for the reduction of monetary poverty (or disparities of income), is the logical next step towards fulfilling that pledge. Some national anti-poverty strategies also include commitments to reduce cross-regional disparities. In Portugal, the national strategy and its 2022–2025 action plan include a specific target defined in terms of territorial inequality that entails reducing the disparity in the poverty rate between the seven regions and two autonomous regions to a maximum of three percentage points in relation to the national average rate.⁷¹

70. Article 30 guarantees the effective exercise of the right to protection against poverty and social exclusion and requires that States Parties take measures within the framework of an overall and coordinated approach to promote the effective access of persons who live or risk living in a situation of social exclusion or poverty, as well as their families, to, in particular, employment, housing, training, education, culture and social and medical assistance. ↩
71. See https://www.justtransition.be/sites/default/files/2024-03/ECJT-break-out%231-Portugese%20poverty%20strategy.pdf. ↩

The indicators chosen to monitor progress can be both quantitative and qualitative, but they should cover three dimensions of implementation: (a) the formal decisions or initiatives to be adopted to provide the adequate regulatory or policy framework (structural indicators); (b) the budgetary commitments required, as well as other resources to be dedicated to implementation (process indicators); and (c) the results to be achieved (outcome indicators).⁷² Outcome indicators are particularly useful to ensure that the effectiveness of policy measures is regularly assessed. This will allow successful interventions to be scaled up where justified or phased out if proved to be unsuccessful.

72. OHCHR, Human Rights Indicators: A Guide to Measurement and Implementation (Geneva, 2012). ↩

Given that the fight against poverty requires the realization of human rights, national statistics institutes should be encouraged to cooperate with national human rights institutions to identify the set of indicators that are best suited to accompany implementation, taking into account both capacity constraints (what is technically feasible) and the need to choose indicators that will best ensure accountability and effective implementation.

Ideally, in addition to the follow-up by the interministerial group tasked with implementation, such strategies should include a specific independent monitoring instrument, involving civil society representatives and people living in poverty themselves. Practices vary in this regard. They include the regular presentation of reports before a parliamentary assembly (Belgium, Ireland and Netherlands (Kingdom of the)) and/or independent expert bodies (Belgium). People living in poverty and their representative organizations are generally involved through consultative bodies such as, in the example of Spain, the Civil Dialogue Commission, the Group for Social Inclusion, Employment and Rural Affairs of the State Council of non-Governmental Organizations and the Social Inclusion Network.⁷³ Alternatively, the body tasked with monitoring implementation, such as the National Advisory Council on Poverty of Canada, can be requested to seek the views of people with lived experience of poverty.

73. See https://www.dsca.gob.es/sites/default/files/derechos-sociales/inclusion/docs/Estrategia_Prevencion_Pobreza_EN.pdf. ↩

Favouring the participation of people living in poverty is one of the benefits that can be expected from the design of national anti-poverty strategies. While it may appear burdensome to ensure the effective participation of people living in poverty in all the policies that affect them, such participation should, at a minimum, be ensured in the design, implementation and evaluation of strategies that aim to ensure that the full range of sectorial policies will converge towards the eradication of poverty.

Some good practices have emerged. In Belgium, participation has been gradually strengthened in its anti-poverty strategies, the fourth version of which was adopted in 2022 and now involves the Belgian Anti-Poverty Network, a specialized administration (the Combat Poverty Service), public centres for social welfare and the Belgian Platform for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion and a network of federal public servants involved in the fight against poverty. France established a consultative body in 1988 (CNLE), bringing together public servants, civil society, social partners, experts and people with direct experience of poverty. In Morocco, a Special Committee was established to guide the design of the new model of development process, allowing almost 10,000 individuals to identify priorities, and the National Initiative for Human Development, launched in 2005, relies mainly on local human development committees that help to identify the initiatives that are most relevant to local communities’ needs. In Portugal, the national strategy works through a consultative forum, involving government and civil society, and the participation of anti-poverty organizations in the follow-up is ensured through the Centre for Planning and Evaluation of Public Policies. Scotland established the Poverty and Inequality Commission in 2019, and a panel of people with lived experience of poverty (the Experts by Experience Panel) now also provides support. In Spain, the National Strategy for Preventing and Fighting Poverty and Social Exclusion 2024–2030 acknowledges the important role of “experts by experience”, while civil society is involved through a working group of the State Council of Social Action Non-Governmental Institutions. These are just a sample, illustrating the rise of participatory planning processes in the fight against poverty.

Not any participation will do, however. Participation is sometimes limited to anti-poverty organizations, without involving people with direct experience of poverty. It is sometimes informal, rather than based on a right to participation stipulated in legislation. Even more importantly, participation too often remains tokenistic, or purely symbolic. It is conceived of as mere consultation, essentially to legitimize choices made beforehand, through technocratic or top-down processes. This, as noted by OECD, risks disappointing citizens and compromising their trust in government.⁷⁴ Even where participation thus conducted leads to policy changes, it remains extractive, organized to obtain from people living in poverty knowledge based on experience – which is especially valuable because it is local and contextual, improving the effectiveness of the intervention – and is not empowering.

74. OECD Guidelines for Citizen Participation Processes, OECD Public Governance Reviews (Paris, 2022), p. 21. ↩

Meaningful participation, as recommended in the guiding principles on extreme poverty and human rights – and as an essential component of the right to development⁷⁵ – should be conceived of as a form of co-construction: decision-making is shared between the policymakers and the people concerned.⁷⁶ This not only ensures that the intervention will be perceived as more legitimate and that it will be more effective (in part because its aims will be better understood by the beneficiaries) but also improves beneficiaries’ knowledge of their rights and encourages them to complain about the poor delivery of services, corruption or other obstacles to the effectiveness of the policy intervention concerned. The IDEEP (Inclusive and Deliberative Elaboration and Evaluation of Policies) tool, co-designed by the Special Rapporteur and ATD Fourth World, is intended to guide the setting up of such genuinely participatory processes, to compensate for the lack of representation of people living in poverty in political decision-making.⁷⁷

75. The Special Rapporteur on the right to development has emphasized that ensuring the full participation of citizens in decisions affecting their development requires the inclusive and meaningful participation of relevant stakeholders at all levels of decision-making (A/HRC/39/51, para. 66). ↩
76. See A/HRC/23/36. ↩
77. See https://www.srpoverty.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-02-12-IDEEP.pdf. ↩

National anti-poverty strategies introduce an element of long-term planning into political decision-making. This allows for the ring-fencing of resources to ensure that the financing of anti-poverty policies will not depend on budgetary choices focused on the need to reduce spending based on short-term considerations linked to balancing public budgets. This is essential: while investments aimed at breaking the vicious cycles that perpetuate poverty (especially by combating child poverty) will appear in the short term as a burden on public finances, they can yield very high returns in the long term. They can improve the later productivity of the child in adult life, reduce healthcare costs and crime rates (and thus the need for law enforcement) over the life cycle, have multiplier effects in the economy and, by building human capital (thus improving the quality of the workforce), strengthen the competitiveness of the economy. Ample research confirms the findings presented by the Special Rapporteur in this regard.⁷⁸ For instance, drawing on Europe-wide survey data from 27 countries, OECD found that child poverty costs on average the equivalent of 3.4 per cent of GDP annually due to lost employment, lost earnings and lost health, as well as the costs of lost government revenue and benefit spending.⁷⁹

78. A/HRC/47/36, paras. 22–32. ↩
79. OECD, The Economic Costs of Childhood Socio-Economic Disadvantage in European OECD Countries, OECD Papers on Well-being and Inequalities No. 9 (2022). See also, for example, Donald Hirsch, “Estimating the costs of child poverty” (New York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2008); Michael McLaughlin and Mark Rank, “Estimating the economic cost of childhood poverty in the United States”, Social Work Research, vol. 42, No. 2 (June 2018); ILO and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), More than a Billion Reasons: The Urgent Need to Build Universal Social Protection for Children (Geneva and New York, 2023); and Dominic Richardson and others, Too Little Too Late: An Assessment of Public Spending on Children by Age in 84 Countries (Florence, UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, 2023). ↩

The long-term planning element of national anti-poverty strategies is especially important where the fight against poverty is aimed at reducing its dependency on socially and environmentally damaging economic growth. The long-term objective of eradicating poverty without relying on infinite growth may call for the adoption of a series of measures that cannot be implemented all at once (from working time reduction to pricing carbon, and from supporting and valuing care work to redefining the role of international trade), not only because of the potential political obstacles, but also because of all the conditions that should be fulfilled before such measures can be rolled out. A multi-year strategy, however, will have to identify the various steps that should be taken to facilitate the adoption of such measures, by creating these background conditions. Such a strategy may therefore help bridge the gap between the long-term vision of a society that has banished poverty without relying on economic growth and the short-term measures that must be taken immediately to move towards fulfilling that vision.

There are indications that Governments are now starting to take more seriously the need to abandon the chimera that growth will automatically alleviate poverty, and finally 77 See https://www.srpoverty.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-02-12-IDEEP.pdf. 78 A/HRC/47/36, paras. 22–32. 79 OECD, The Economic Costs of Childhood Socio-Economic Disadvantage in European OECD Countries, OECD Papers on Well-being and Inequalities No. 9 (2022). See also, for example, Donald Hirsch, “Estimating the costs of child poverty” (New York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2008); Michael McLaughlin and Mark Rank, “Estimating the economic cost of childhood poverty in the United States”, Social Work Research, vol. 42, No. 2 (June 2018); ILO and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), More than a Billion Reasons: The Urgent Need to Build Universal Social Protection for Children (Geneva and New York, 2023); and Dominic Richardson and others, Too Little Too Late: An Assessment of Public Spending on Children by Age in 84 Countries (Florence, UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, 2023). GE.26-05092 moving to place the fight against poverty and inequalities above abstract measures of general affluence, such as GDP. It is this shift that the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth seeks to support.

The Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty was launched under the Brazilian presidency of the G20 to strengthen international cooperation in support of anti-poverty policies that have been proven to work. Its “policy basket” identifies a range of such policies in areas such as social protection, support to smallholder farmers, basic services and nutrition, while its country programme support component aims to mobilize financial and knowledge support to government-led programmes, thus ensuring that existing national frameworks, social registries and service delivery systems are better supported by the international community. Under the Alliance’s 2030 sprints, 41 national Governments, 13 intergovernmental organizations and financial institutions and 19 non-State actors committed to support the scaling up of policies such as income transfers, school feeding programmes, socioeconomic inclusion, early childhood development, family farming and water access. The initiative is founded on the conviction that, in times of constrained fiscal space, the fragmentation and duplication of efforts in the fight against poverty carry heightened opportunity costs.

The South African presidency of the G20 requested a group of experts to provide a diagnosis on the state of inequalities in the world and on how to address them. In its final report, the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality proposed the establishment of an international panel on inequality, to address the inequality emergency. In his contributions to the panel, the Special Rapporteur recommended that it support Governments’ efforts to monitor not only outcome and market inequalities, but also social mobility. He also proposed that the panel establish, alongside working groups on measuring inequalities and on the impacts of growing inequalities, a working group on policy options to reduce inequalities, in order to explore solutions that go beyond the classic “grow-tax-transfer” approach that has hitherto been prioritized in the fight against vertical inequalities.

Indeed, the work of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on a human rights economy,⁸⁰ the proposals on well-being measurement from the Secretary-General’s High-level Expert Group on Beyond GDP⁸¹ (the work of which will be complemented by the Expert Group on Well-being Measurement, tasked with designing a framework for inclusive and sustainable well-being) or the launch by Spain, OECD, the Ibero-American General Secretariat and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development of the Beyond GDP Global Alliance at the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, all reflect the growing recognition that prevailing economic frameworks are failing and that something else is needed.

80. See https://www.ohchr.org/en/sdgs/human-rights-economy-seeding-change-economy-enhances-human-rights. ↩
81. The Secretary-General established the High-level Expert Group in May 2025, in accordance with the Pact for the Future adopted on 22 September 2024. The Group presented an interim report at the Second World Summit for Social Development, in November 2025; its final report had not yet been released at the time of writing. ↩

This was also the main message of the Special Rapporteur in his report to the Human Rights Council at its fifty-sixth session: credible anti-poverty strategies should not only move beyond post hoc compensation (Lever One) to include measures to make markets more inclusive by design (Lever Two) and to increase social investment (Lever Three) but also seek to reduce dependency on economic growth in order to lessen the tension between poverty eradication and the reduction of inequalities, on the one hand, and environmental pressures, on the other hand, and to avoid falling into a form of counter-productive growth, one that, in the name of stimulating growth, ends up flexibilizing work at the expense of workers’ rights and creating a business-friendly investment climate at the expense of fiscal justice and the health of communities.⁸²

82. A/HRC/56/61, para. 4. ↩

The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth is the result of 18 months of deliberations and development by a range of actors (Member States, unions, civil society, independent experts and United Nations agencies), who joined forces to identify a set of priority measures that could meet this challenge. The Roadmap lists measures under five pillars (transforming economic systems; labour, care and economic democracy; universal basic services and social protection; ecological justice; and transforming the international economic order), completed by a transversal pillar that identifies governance tools to achieve a just, orderly and democratic transition. In presenting this Roadmap, the Special Rapporteur hopes to enrich the policy toolbox in the fight against poverty, beyond existing pathway dependencies.

The policy proposals identified have been carefully assessed, based on existing experimentations, to guide action and to accelerate collective learning. Yet, not all proposals are suited to specific country circumstances. In particular, while high-income countries should address priorities other than economic growth, low-income countries still need growth in order to finance infrastructure and to improve the well-being of their populations. Even in those countries, however, growth as it has been pursued until now is not sustainable and has often widened existing gaps between rich and poor groups of the population. As a result of the debt burden, such growth has been focused on export competitiveness. It has been based on resource extraction and on the exploitation of a cheap and compliant workforce. Such a model of development is unsustainable: it carries huge environmental costs and fails to effectively tackle poverty.

A key question that the Roadmap seeks to answer is how States can expand the provision of public services and financing social protection while reducing their dependency on economic growth. Two strategies can be pursued to reduce such dependency. A first set of tools can aim to minimize the demand for welfare spending, by acting ex ante rather than ex post to improve well-being and reduce pre-distribution inequalities. They include preventive healthcare interventions, pre-distributive social policies (Levers Two and Three, as outlined above) and the mitigation of, and adaptation to, environmental risks. A second set of tools can address the supply side by reducing the growth dependence of the provision of social support. They include increasing public revenue through progressive taxation (of both income and, especially, of wealth), strengthening corporate taxation and taxing environmentally destructive activities, as well as maximizing the poverty-reducing impacts of social protection, by decommodifying the provision of goods and services serving essential needs and organizing their allocation on the basis of reciprocity or redistribution, thus reverting the trend towards privatization, a shift sometimes referred to as the remunicipalization of basic services. In addition, monetary policies can be designed to serve well-being rather than growth. While most monetary creation today is in the hands of commercial financial institutions that seek to fund profitable activities, rather than to finance what truly matters, monetary creation could be redirected, within certain constraints to reduce inflationary risks, to better serve the objectives of the eco-social transition.

If poverty is manufactured – produced and reproduced by institutional choices about how labour is valued, how wealth is taxed, how care is remunerated and how markets are regulated – then eradicating it cannot rely only on compensating for its effects: it requires transforming the economic rules, incentive structures and power relations that systematically generate it. The human rights economy is the systemic approach required to rebuild economies so that they deliver the well-being of all people within planetary boundaries, redirecting production and investment away from accumulation for the few and towards the fulfilment of rights for the many. The Roadmap is about that vision; it is also about the steps needed to move towards its implementation. 82 A/HRC/56/61, para. 4. GE.26-05092

Participants in the 2027 Sustainable Development Goals Summit will consider development by 2030 and beyond. The fight against poverty and inequalities should be at the heart of the new generation of development goals – recognizing that poverty is not inevitable, but manufactured by policy choices and structural injustices. This is a battle that can be won. However, it will require a leap in imagination, more audacity, and stronger political will.

More imagination. Member States should increase their efforts to combat poverty and reduce inequalities without relying on economic growth alone. Adopting measures of progress that go beyond GDP and are aligned with human rights norms and standards, consistent with the proposals of the Secretary-General’s High-level Expert Group on Beyond GDP and the request contained in the Pact for the Future, is a first step. This alone with not suffice, however: it is time to move not only beyond GDP, but also beyond growth, and to take policy measures that will prioritize well-being above economic growth alone.

More audacity and stronger political will. Consistent with the guiding principles on extreme poverty and human rights, rights-based national anti-poverty strategies should be designed to measure poverty and inequalities across all their dimensions (including social mobility and the hidden dimensions of poverty), to set binding targets for poverty reduction and the reduction of inequalities and to ensure accountability, participation and long-term planning for intergenerational fairness, identifying the budgetary needs and ringfencing resources to that end. Such strategies will only be effective if they combine post-market redistribution with in-market reforms and pre-market social investment. Economies should be made inclusive and sustainable by design, rather than simply geared towards growth and export competitiveness, and the cycles that perpetuate chronic poverty from one generation to the next should be broken.

The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights can contribute to this effort. It should require that anti-poverty strategies be adopted. It should also insist that States Parties to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights address the question of non-take-up of rights and that they take effective measures to combat discrimination on grounds of socioeconomic disadvantage.

The international panel on inequality could also play a major role in this regard. Its ability to make a difference, however, will depend on whether it will be able to guide Governments into addressing social mobility, and to explore policy options beyond growth. The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth can provide a source of inspiration in this regard, in particular because it connects the demands of social movements with scientific expertise, and because it brings together constituencies mobilizing for social justice and constituencies seeking to prevent further environmental collapse.

In closing, the Special Rapporteur expresses his deep gratitude for the trust placed in him during his tenure. Yet, no expertise can match the expert knowledge of people living in poverty, who have all too often been ignored in the search for solutions that can address their predicament. Policies that exclude people living in poverty are bound to fail: success will come only by listening to them, and learning from them.