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Seven years ago, more than 100 nations made a bold commitment via the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger between 1990 and 2015. Now, midway between the declaration and the deadline, there is mixed news to report—while the world is on track to reach this goal at the global level, many countries are not, and millions of poor people are certain to be left behind.

Though the number of poor people has plummeted at an historic pace worldwide, progress so far has varied widely across the developing regions of the world. In Asia, the number of poor people fell by 300 million during the past two decades, particularly in East Asia and the Pacific. But poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean increased slightly during this time. And Sub-Saharan Africa tells a far gloomier story: poverty there jumped by a staggering 58 million people.

Such dramatically different outcomes between regions beg the question: Are today's development efforts actually reaching those most in need, or are they primarily benefiting those who are simply easier to reach, leaving the very poorest behind?

Answering this question requires a more nuanced understanding of just who the poor are. Often, they are viewed as a uniform group facing similar challenges. Underscoring this notion is the "dollar-a-day" measurement, the threshold defined by the international community as absolute poverty, below which survival is in question. Currently, 1 billon people worldwide fit into this category.

But such a large number masks the multitude of people living in varying degrees of poverty—all of them poor, but some of them even more desperately poor than others.

New research by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) finds that those who live closer to the dollar-a-day line have been much easier to reach than those living well below it. In fact, the incidence of poverty below half a dollar a day—ultra poverty—has proved intractable in many regions of the world, where 162 million people are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and hunger. This is a significant number of people: if all of the ultra poor were concentrated in a single nation, it would be the world's seventh most populous country after China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, and Pakistan.

It is clear that a better understanding of the degrees of poverty and their associated challenges is needed to accelerate progress toward achieving the MDG target. So, who are the poorest of the poor? They are individuals who face exclusion because of their ethnicity, gender, or disability; they are households living in remote, typically rural, areas unconnected to roads, markets, schools, and health services; they are people with few assets with which to access credit or cope in the aftermath of a catastrophe, such as illness or natural disaster.

IFPRI research found that the poorest households are generally four times less likely to be connected to electricity than households living above the dollar-a-day line. In every part of the world, the poorest men and women are the least educated in society, and their children are less likely to attend school.

Given such limited opportunities, poverty is inherited from generation to generation and increasingly diminishes the chances for a better livelihood. Development efforts that do not focus on the poorest of the poor will not be sufficient to achieve the MDG target.

What is urgently needed now is policies and programs that focus on access to markets, credit, education, health care, and other basic needs—tools that will equip people to move out of poverty. With the majority of the world's poorest living in rural areas, special attention must also be paid to agriculture and rural development. But all this cannot be accomplished through economic growth alone. To truly reach the poorest, growth must be equitable and the benefits must be widespread.

In October, experts from around the world gathered in Beijing for the conference, "Taking Action for the World's Poor and Hungry People," jointly organized by IFPRI and the Chinese State Council Leading Group Office on Poverty Alleviation and Development. The conference aims to address these very issues and identify a way forward.

In a mere eight years, the deadline set by the global community to reduce poverty and hunger will be here. Will today's most deprived people have a more promising, healthier, and secure life in 2015? Let us work urgently to ensure that they do.