Countries by Population living in slums (% of urban population)
South Sudan ranks first with 94.2% of its urban population living in slums, meaning nearly all city dwellers lack adequate housing conditions by international standards. At the other end, 18 countries including Germany, France, Singapore, and Norway report 0%. The 94.2 percentage point gap between the top and bottom of this ranking reflects the extreme disparity in urban living conditions across the 196 countries covered.
Ranking 2022
Values shown in %.
Analysis
This metric measures the share of urban residents living in slum households, expressed as a percentage. The World Bank's World Development Indicators (indicator code EN.POP.SLUM.UR.ZS) defines the population living in slums as the proportion of the urban population living in slum households, where a slum household is defined as a group of individuals living under the same roof lacking one or more of the following conditions: access to improved water, access to improved sanitation, sufficient living area, housing durability, and security of tenure, as adopted in the Millennium Development Goal Target. A higher value means a greater share of the urban population lives in inadequate conditions, so in this ranking higher is worse by conventional welfare standards, though the site presents it as higher rank. The dataset covers 196 countries with data from 2022, with 95.4% of entries based on data from the last seven years. All 100% of datapoints are classified as official quality, and no extreme statistical outliers were identified using a 3-standard-deviation threshold.
The top of the ranking is concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and fragile states. South Sudan leads at 94.2%, followed by Mali at 92.5% and Burkina Faso at 87.9%. Chad ranks fifth at 82% and the Democratic Republic of Congo sixth at 78.4%. Afghanistan, at rank 9 with 71.6%, is the only country outside Africa in the top ten. Sudan ranks 8th at 73.7% and Niger ranks 10th at 70.4%. These countries share urban environments where the majority of city residents lack one or more of the five conditions that define adequate housing under the metric's definition.
The middle of the ranking includes several countries with values that may appear counterintuitive. Ecuador ranks 22nd at 57.8%, higher than many Sub-Saharan African countries ranked below it. Ireland appears at rank 104 with 8.5%, sitting between Montenegro at 8.8% and Armenia at 8.4%. India ranks 116th at 5.41%, a relatively low share given the scale of its urban population. A notable anomaly is the cluster at rank 33, where Djibouti, Eritrea, Mauritius, Seychelles, and Somalia all share an identical value of 48.69%, which likely reflects a modeled or imputed estimate rather than independently measured data for each country. Similarly, Bhutan, Iran, and Sri Lanka share an identical value of 44.69% at rank 46.
Several limitations affect interpretation of this metric. The identical values shared by multiple countries at ranks 33 and 46 suggest that some figures are modeled or carried forward from earlier surveys rather than directly measured in 2022. Security of tenure, one of the five defining conditions, is particularly difficult to measure consistently across legal systems and land tenure frameworks. Countries with large informal urban populations may have varying capacities to enumerate slum dwellers, which can compress or inflate reported percentages. The metric captures a binary household-level condition but does not reflect the severity of deprivation within slum populations. Comparisons between countries should account for differences in urbanization rates, since a 50% slum share in a highly urbanized country represents a different absolute scale than the same share in a country with low urban population.
Methodology
Data are drawn from the World Bank World Development Indicators, indicator code EN.POP.SLUM.UR.ZS, with a reference year of 2022. The metric is defined as the proportion of the urban population living in slum households, where a slum household is defined as a group of individuals living under the same roof lacking one or more of the following conditions: access to improved water, access to improved sanitation, sufficient living area, housing durability, and security of tenure, as adopted in the Millennium Development Goal Target. The unit is percentage of urban population. The ranking covers 196 countries. Of these, 187 out of 196 (95.4%) have data from within the last seven years, and 181 out of 196 (92.3%) report data from the latest reference year of 2022. All datapoints are classified as official quality (100%). No extreme outliers were identified using a 3-standard-deviation threshold. The average year-over-year change across the dataset is 39.8%, below the 50% volatility threshold. Values range from 0.00% to 94.20%, a spread of 999% on a relative basis, indicating very high variance across the sample.