In 1990, the first Human Development Report introduced a new approach for advancing human wellbeing. Human development – or the human development approach - is about expanding the richness of human life, rather than simply the richness of the economy in which human beings live. It is an approach that is focused on people and their opportunities and choices. 

As the international community moves toward implementing and monitoring the 2030 agenda, the human development approach remains useful to articulating the objectives of development and improving people’s well-being by ensuring an equitable, sustainable, and stable planet.

Below you can see the progress of human development in Kyrgyzstan over the past few years. You can also explore the global progress in detail here.

2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index

This 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report, for the first time, overlays data on climate hazards and multidimensional poverty to assess how exposed poor people are to environmental shocks. The report highlights that most people in poverty are exposed to at least one climate hazard; many confront several at the same time. By the end of this century, the countries projected to face the steepest temperature increases are those already burdened with higher levels of multidimensional poverty.

This year’s update of the global MPI database includes new data from 13 countries. It presents MPI data from 109 countries, along with subnational estimates covering 1,359 regions across 101 countries. The results show that 1.1 billion of 6.3 billion people live in acute multidimensional poverty, over half of them children. Common deprivations include a lack of clean cooking fuel, housing, sanitation, nutrition, and electricity.

The intertwining of climate and poverty risks is likely to intensify in the future, and the report makes a compelling case for addressing a double burden that may only worsen.

2025 Human Development Report

Artificial intelligence (AI) has broken into a dizzying gallop. While AI feats grab headlines, they privilege technology in a make-believe vacuum, obscuring what really matters: people’s choices.

The choices that people have and can realize, within ever expanding freedoms, are essential to human development, whose goal is for people to live lives they value and have reason to value. A world with AI is flush with choices the exercise of which is both a matter of human development and a means to advance it.

Going forward, development depends less on what AI can do—not on how human-like it is perceived to be—and more on mobilizing people’s imaginations to reshape economies and societies to make the most of it. Instead of trying vainly to predict what will happen, this year’s Human Development Report asks what choices can be made so that new development pathways for all countries dot the horizon, helping everyone have a shot at thriving in a world with AI.