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About 5.7 million in Syria live in extreme poverty amid civil war, World Bank says
- Two World Bank reports show that more than one in four Syrians live in extreme poverty, which was virtually non-existent before the war
- The 13-year-long war has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions more
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More than a quarter of Syrians lived in extreme poverty, the World Bank said on Saturday, 13 years into a devastating civil war that has battered the economy and impoverished millions.
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The World Bank published two new reports on Syria, which found that “27 per cent of Syrians – about 5.7 million individuals – live in extreme poverty”.
“Extreme poverty, while virtually non-existent before the conflict, affected more than one in four Syrians in 2022” and might have further deteriorated after a deadly earthquake last year, one of the reports said.
The quake killed about 6,000 people in the country.
According to the United Nations, about 90 per cent of Syrians live in poverty, while it previously estimated that around 2 million lived in extreme poverty after more than a decade of war.
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The report cited neighbour Lebanon’s economic meltdown in late 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, as having eroded the welfare of Syrian households in recent years.
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