Countries With the Lowest HDI

Every country with a figure for hdi, ranked from lowest to highest. The top three are South Sudan (0.388), Somalia, Fed. Rep. (0.404) and Central African Republic (0.414). The middle country of the 193 has 0.762.

What this measures

Human Development Index, in index, 0 to 1. Source: United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report Office. For this measure, higher is better.

The geometric mean (a kind of average that multiplies the parts together) of three parts: income per person (GNI per capita), life expectancy, and schooling (expected years and average years). All four inputs are on this site, and each is flagged. So a link between the HDI and any of them is shown for what it is: the index matching a part of itself. For the same reason it is kept out of this site's own topic scores. Those already contain its parts, and adding it would count each twice. It is the most-cited development index there is. It is here mostly so its parts can be read separately.

This measure mostly follows how rich a country is, so this ranking is close to a ranking by national income. Each country’s page also ranks it against countries with similar incomes, which is often the fairer comparison.

The full ranking

Each country’s latest figure, from 2023–2023. The year beside each value says when it was measured.

More on hdi

• Countries With the Highest HDI
• HDI by country: trend over time and what it goes with

Related rankings

• Countries With the Lowest Public Social Spending
• Countries With the Lowest Family Benefits Spending
• Countries With the Lowest Old-age Spending
• Countries With the Lowest Aid Given
• Countries With the Lowest Government Spending per Capita
• Countries With the Lowest Corporate Tax Rates
• Countries With the Lowest Inequality-adjusted HDI
• Countries With the Lowest GDP per Capita (PPP)

A ranking describes countries, not the people in them, and a high or low place does not by itself say why. All country rankings.