World Bank data released in 2024 confirmed that approximately 64 percent of Haiti’s population of 11.7 million people lived on less than $3.65 per day — the international poverty line for lower-middle-income countries — placing Haiti among the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere and reflecting the cumulative impact of years of political crisis, security collapse, economic contraction, and humanitarian emergency on household welfare.
The poverty figure represented a significant deterioration from pre-crisis levels and reflected the destruction of livelihoods, the loss of assets, and the collapse of income opportunities that the combined effects of gang violence, political instability, and economic contraction had produced. For the individuals behind the statistics — 7.5 million people living on less than a few dollars a day — the poverty figure translated into impossible daily choices about food, healthcare, education, and shelter.
The economic dimensions of Haiti’s crisis received less international attention than the security and political dimensions, but their consequences were no less severe. An economy that had contracted for seven consecutive years, with inflation running at high rates and currency depreciation making imported goods increasingly expensive, had produced a standard of living for most Haitians that was significantly lower than it had been a decade earlier.
Economists studying Haiti’s economic trajectory noted that recovery from the current level of poverty and economic contraction would require sustained growth of several percent annually for years — an achievement that required security conditions, governance effectiveness, and investment attraction that were all contingent on the political and security stabilization that had yet to materialize. The path from current conditions to any reasonable standard of human welfare was long and the preconditions for traveling it were still being established.