Pakistan’s once-promising poverty reduction trajectory has come to a troubling halt, reversing years of hard-fought gains. After dramatically reducing poverty from 64.3 per cent in 2001 to 21.9 per cent in 2018 -- declining by 3 percentage points annually until 2015 before slowing to less than 1 percentage point per year -- recent compounding shocks have pushed poverty rates back up to a projected 25.3 per cent by 2023-24, the report states.