Poverty began rising again from around 2020 amid COVID, inflation, floods and macro stress.
Source
World Bank — https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2025/09/22/pakistan-bold-sustained-people-centered-reforms-needed-to-reduce-poverty-build-resilience-and-protect-vulnerable-populat. Verified in source set / retroactive normalization pending.
What it proves
Earlier poverty reduction was insufficiently resilient to shocks.
What it does not prove: Four shocks arrive together — pandemic, inflation, floods and macro stress — so this cannot apportion weight to any one of them, and analysts who blame the floods alone miss that the turn began around 2020. The reversal is also largely modelled forward from the 2018-19 survey baseline rather than directly measured year by year.
Memory hook: 2020 → the year two decades of poverty reduction started running backwards
Rebuts the claim: "The 2022 floods explain Pakistan's recent rise in poverty" — poverty had already begun rising around 2020, before the floods.