Fordham’s Pope Francis Global Poverty Report 2025

Part 1: Pope Francis’ Primary Indicators

​Pope Francis identified seven basic human needs that are essential for a minimal level of both material well-being and spiritual freedom. Francis sees water, food, housing, and employment as essential for material well-being. He also sees education, religious freedom, and other civil rights, such as gender equity, as essential for spiritual freedom. 
 
The researchers at Fordham carefully evaluated various statistics that could serve as appropriate measures for each of the seven basic human needs. Our selection criteria followed a robust yet straightforward approach. First, we sought a statistic that best captures Pope Francis’ views on each of these seven basic human needs. In particular, we chose statistics that measure the welfare of the most marginalized people. Next, we needed the data to be public and easily accessible so that our results could be reproduced anywhere in the world. An important concern was ensuring geographical coverage and obtaining as many observations as possible. Finally, we were concerned about the consistency, reliability, and credibility of the data. We sought to use data collected and distributed by respected international organizations, such as the United Nations and the World Bank. 
 
In the following sections, we provide a more detailed definition, identification, and justification for each of the seven measures we have chosen. 
 
Material Well-Being Indicators
In this section, we will review each of Pope Francis’s four indicators of material well-being: water, food, housing, and employment. In the classical tradition, human material needs are both physical and social. Water and food are representative of basic human physical goods needed to sustain the body, while housing and employment are representative of basic human social goods needed to sustain families and communities. 
 
Marginalized people cannot be denied the basic material goods they need to live a genuinely human life where they can contribute to the common good and become “dignified agents of their own destiny.” 
 
We will describe the choice of statistics we used to measure each indicator, discuss recent global trends, and identify areas of the world that are most lacking in these basic material needs. 
 
Water
We estimate that in 2022, roughly 707 million people, or 8.8% of the world’s population, lack basic access to drinking water. From 2013 to 2022 in the percentage and number of people lacking basic access to drinking water compared to previous years, we saw an improvement. 
 
Pope Francis includes access to drinking water as a basic human need because it is fundamental to sustaining human life. He argues that it is not enough for the marginalized to have access to any type of water. The water should be clean and readily accessible when needed, without undue burden. 
 
We chose the percentage of a nation’s population with basic access to drinking water services from an improved drinking water source as the best statistic to measure Pope Francis’ understanding of the fundamental human need for clean water. This statistic measures a population’s access to drinking water from improved sources with collection time not exceeding 30 minutes for a round-trip, including queuing. Improved drinking water sources are those that have the potential to deliver safe water by the nature of their design and construction and including: piped water, boreholes or tubewells, protected dug wells, protected springs, rainwater, and packaged or delivered water. The latest data available from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) water and sanitation database was from 2022. For 2022, data were available for 207 countries. 
 
International Distribution of Needs 
The country with the least access to improved water sources is the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nine of the ten countries with the most limited access to drinking water are in Africa, while the third most deprived country—Papua New Guinea—is in Oceania. 

Water deprivation is heavily concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, with sporadic instances of deprivation in the Middle East and Asia. 
 
Fordham University, Bronx, New York.