Where does Afghanistan stand in international rankings for poverty, development and similar indices?
At the September 2000 Millennium Summit of the General Assembly of the United Nations, world leaders committed themselves to a common vision of world peace, development, poverty eradication and human rights through a set of benchmarks and targets known as the Millennium Development Goals. This provided the overarching framework to the government of Afghanistan’s national development strategy, which made poverty alleviation its top priority. Almost eight years since starting the current reconstruction and development initiatives, Afghanistan continues to exhibit high poverty indicators, standing at 62.3 in the human poverty index and at 0.345 in the human development index, placing it in the 174th position out of 178 countries. Furthermore, on the governance scale, Afghanistan is classified as a fragile state, with the World Bank’s country policy and institutional assessment putting it among states that have ‘poor policy performance or low service delivery capacity with a lack of respon
