Honduras poverty assessment: toward a path of poverty reduction and inclusive growth

Honduras, already among the poorest countries in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, experienced weak poverty reduction in 2014-19 compared to other countries in the region. The COVID-19 pandemic and hurricanes Eta and Iota led to a rise in poverty from 2019 to 2020; it is likely that poverty will remain above prepandemic levels in 2021. The economic rebound in 2021, as well as the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, led to an increase in food prices; at the same time, Honduras’s population is vulnerable to rising food prices and food insecurity is high. In 2019, the extreme poor spent almost half of their income on food. Additionally, food insecurity was persistently high. A striking feature of Honduras is the deep and widening urban- rural divide in terms of quality of life. There is a wide urban-rural poverty gap for both the moderate and the extreme poor, which reflects significant disparities in access to basic services such as electricity, water, and sanitation, and internet usage, as well as lower human capital accumulation and worsen labor market indicators in rural areas. While overall income inequality has been stagnant since 2014, inequality in rural areas has increased while in urban areas it has declined. The country is one of the most unequal countries in LAC. Hondurans continue to face deep and persistent disparities in access to and quality of education, with rural areas heavily penalized, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, despite high spending on education. Subnational disparities are particularly large; poverty continues to be most heavily concentrated in the country’s southwestern areas, in departments with higher shares of ethnic minorities, and in municipalities located in the south and southwest. This report focuses on the factors that have contributed to these observed poverty and inequality trends and patterns in Honduras.