Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, pursuant to the Answer of 24 September 2020 to Question 91694 on overseas aid: poverty, in which countries the bottom billion poorest people live.

There is no internationally recognised definition of the "bottom billion", and as such identifying countries least able to escape poverty is an inexact science. Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) analysis finds that today, about 62 per cent of the poorest billion people live in Africa, by 2045 it will have risen to around 85 per cent with the rest distributed around Middle East and North Africa, and Central America. DRC, Nigeria, Niger, Mozambique, Uganda, Madagascar and Sudan alone are expected to account for 50 per cent of the world's poorest billion. Similarly, the poorest billion people are projected to increasingly live in the current set of fragile countries owing to their weak growth and economic transformation. FCDO analysis looking at the bottom billion suggests it includes 55 countries with a combined population of 1.2 billion in 2019.