Ending extreme poverty starts with understanding it

Every year on 17 October, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty brings people around the world together to recognise the realities faced by people experiencing poverty and renew our shared commitment to ending it.  

That commitment feels particularly urgent today. 

Progress in reducing extreme poverty has slowed dramatically. The World Bank has warned that the world is not on track to achieve the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, with conflict and fragility, inequality, economic pressures and climate-related shocks all contributing to stalled progress. These challenges do not occur in isolation. They interact, often affecting those with the fewest resources and who face the greatest barriers to withstanding another shock most severely. 

For Concern Worldwide, this goes to the heart of our mission. Our commitment to the elimination of extreme poverty and the reduction of suffering requires us not only to respond to immediate needs, but to understand why people experience extreme poverty, what keeps them there, what increases vulnerability when crises occur, and what strengths and opportunities can support lasting change. 

That is the purpose of How Concern Understands Extreme Poverty, or HCUEP. Concern has long recognised that poverty is multidimensional. Our revised HCUEP policy builds on that understanding, while reflecting what we have learned from applying the framework in the increasingly fragile and crisis-affected contexts in which we work. HCUEP provides the lens through which we understand extreme poverty and helps translate that understanding into decisions about our programmes and approaches, ultimately helping us deliver on our organisational mission, vision and Theory of Change. 

Understanding poverty is essential to our work as the drivers and contributors to poverty are complex. Opportunities available to someone are shaped not only by the resources they have, but by whether they can benefit from those resources, the inequalities and power structures they experience, the shocks and stresses they face, and how vulnerable they are to their effects. 

This revised HCUEP framework brings these together through four interconnected dimensions: assets and return on assets; intersectional inequalities; shocks and stresses; and vulnerability. The four dimensions interact to deepen extreme poverty, but when the barriers within them are addressed, they can also create pathways towards lasting positive change. 

Importantly, this means looking beyond people's needs. It means understanding their agency, knowledge, strengths and priorities, while also recognising the systems, barriers, power relations and structural factors that shape their lives.  

The revised HCUEP retains the fundamental principle that poverty is multidimensional which has underpinned Concern's approach since the framework was first adopted in 2010, while making it more responsive to the realities of our work in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. 

The changes make HCUEP more explicitly locally led, power-aware and systems-informed, while recognising the importance of addressing structural drivers of poverty and bringing together approaches including equality, protection, climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction, conflict sensitivity and the environment. The framework is designed to be applied flexibly, with the depth of analysis shaped by each context. 

This matters because there is no single pathway into extreme poverty and therefore no single pathway out of it. 

A climate shock can destroy assets and livelihoods. Conflict can disrupt essential services and force families from their homes. Inequalities can determine who can access education, healthcare, markets or opportunities. Existing vulnerabilities can mean that the same shock has very different consequences for different people. 

Understanding the interactions between these dimensions allows us to make better decisions about where and how we work, who we work with, what barriers need to change and where people's own capacities and strengths can be supported. 

Ending extreme poverty requires us to look at the whole picture: what people have, what stands in their way, the risks they face, the systems that shape their opportunities and, importantly, the capacities and strengths they already possess. 

For Concern, our understanding of extreme poverty is therefore not simply a framework on paper. It is part of how we translate our mission into action. HCUEP helps us make better choices about where and how we work, who we work with, and how we can contribute to change that lasts. 

It also brings us back to a central message of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Lasting solutions to poverty need to recognise the voices, knowledge and lived experience of people experiencing it.  

As we mark the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, at a time when progress cannot be taken for granted, our renewed HCUEP framework reinforces a fundamental commitment: to understand the realities of people's lives in all their complexity, to recognise their agency and strengths, and to use that understanding to work alongside communities and partners towards a world free from poverty, fear and oppression.