The Invisible Billions: Why Global Statistics Are Failing the Poor

We assume that in the age of satellites and big data, we know exactly how many people live on our planet. We are wrong.

If statisticians and demographers cannot judge the size of the world's population with a serious degree of accuracy, it is no surprise that we have no trustworthy source of data on the most basic problems facing the poor: health, water, migration, and starvation.

Recent findings suggest that millions of people are starving entirely out of sight, simply because they do not exist on the map.

Weakness in Numbers

In March 2025, Professor Josias Lang-Ritter, a researcher at the University of Aalto in Finland, published a seminal study that challenges the foundation of global development data.

He and his colleagues calculated the number of people in about 300 rural communities globally. Their findings were shocking: their figures were substantially different - often higher than those published by the UN and other international bodies.

Why the discrepancy?

1. Incomplete Censuses: Enumerators rarely reach deep rural areas.

2. Flawed Methodology: Agencies often rely on satellite imagery to distribute regional population counts, a method that fails to capture the density of rural living.

The study suggests that some rural populations are 53% to 84% higher than official statistics indicate. If we are undercounting the rural poor by nearly double, we have absolutely no idea how much food is actually needed to prevent starvation.

The Trouble with ‘Western’ Concepts

The problem isn't just about counting heads; it’s about how we ask questions.

I have found over the years that concepts we take for granted in the First World - such as abstract numbers or survey logic have limited use in some other cultures. This is not a question of intelligence; it is a question of cultural dissonance.

For example, when agricultural advisors ask local farmers to measure a plot in square metres or count seeds to judge production improvements, the farmers often do not follow the instruction. Their framework for counting might be physical spreading fingers on the ground rather than abstract mathematics.

I recall working in Ethiopia as an advisor on small-scale industries; when I asked some workers to sort items by colour, they simply had no concept of distinguishing them in that way.

This leads to a disconnect in how we measure ‘success’ in development aid.

"If a concept is missing, the local language might not have the vocabulary needed to explain it."

This is why I dispute the award of the 2019 Nobel Prize in economics to Banerjee and Duflo. Their reliance on randomised control trials assumes that filling out a questionnaire is a universal concept. It is not. In many communities, the very idea of a survey is outside their mental framework.

The Mother Who Could Not Be Separated

This cultural gap was illustrated perfectly by Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist (and my former teacher).

He described an experiment in West Bengal where young local women interviewed older mothers about food shortages. They asked the mothers repeatedly: "Did you have enough to eat last night?"

The answer was always, "Yes my child, we’ve had enough to eat."

The interviewers pressed, trying to ask about the mother specifically, not the family. But the mother could not conceptually separate her own hunger from the state of her family. To her, if the family ate, she ate.

Standard data collection misses these nuances entirely. A tick-box on a survey would record that woman as ‘fed’, whilst she may be starving.

The Tyranny of Remoteness

Finally, we face the physical reality of geography. In most poor countries, vast areas are unreachable during rainy seasons.

If local agricultural advisors cannot reach these villages to help, it is certain that census enumerators are not reaching them to count.

Conclusion

We are trying to solve global hunger with a map that has blank spaces and a calculator that is missing buttons.

To truly fight poverty, we must look beyond the spreadsheet. We need to analyse the cultural frameworks of the people we are trying to help, and we need to acknowledge that the ‘official numbers’ are hiding a much more desperate reality.

We cannot fix what we do not truly see.

This topic is explored in further detail in Benny Dembitzer’s book, THE GLOBAL FAMINE GAME: TOXIC AID, A WEAPON OF WAR, PERVERSE ECONOMICS, available now on Amazon.