Fragile contexts: The world’s most dangerous places

Two billion people live in places classified as fragile contexts. Marred by conflict and violence, fragile contexts are some of the world’s most dangerous places to live. In these places, life can change in an instant due to economic instability, political unrest and food shortages. Chronic instability exposes children and their families to extreme levels of food insecurity, exploitation and violence, making life unbearable and unsafe. Experts predict that a staggering 80 per cent of the world’s poorest people will live in these regions by 2030.

What are fragile contexts?

Fragile contexts are the world’s most dangerous places. They are countries, cities, regions and communities that are fraught with chronic instability, conflict and violence, trapping large numbers of people in a cycle of desperation and poverty.

Fragile Pockets in Urban and National Contexts

It’s important to note that fragile contexts can exist within small pockets of otherwise stable or semi-stable countries. With more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas, cities are increasingly emerging as pockets of fragility, especially where infrastructure, governance, and social services are under strain. According to the OECD’s States of Fragility 2025 report, 2 billion people live in high or extreme fragility contexts, accounting for 72% of the world’s extreme poor.

Urban fragility is also reflected in refugee dynamics— 58% of the world’s refugees now live in cities, where they face challenges accessing housing, employment, and basic services, as highlighted by the UNHCR Global Compact on Refugees. The UNHCR warns that forced displacement is at unprecedented levels, with 123 million people displaced globally, and that number could rise to 139 million in 2025 due to escalating conflicts and climate disasters.

Honduras: A Case Study in Fragile Urban Pockets

Honduras exemplifies a country with fragile urban and rural pockets, where children and families face enormous risks due to high levels of violence, poverty, and displacement. According to the Honduras Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2025, over 1.6 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, with violence manifesting through gender-based violence, child recruitment, and forced displacement.

The Human Rights Watch World Report 2025 notes that 64% of the population lives below the poverty line, and 41.5% in extreme poverty. Children in Honduras are particularly vulnerable due to overcrowding, lack of education, and limited career opportunities, compounded by frequent climate-related disasters such as floods and droughts.

How is fragility determined?

World Vision continues to define fragility using data from three leading indices: the Maplecroft Global Risk Analytics, the Fund for Peace’s Fragile States Index, and the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Peace Index. These sources offer some of the most comprehensive and current insights into political, security, and governance conditions, with some child-specific indicators included.

Using data from these indices, World Vision identified the ten most fragile countries in 2025 as:

• Somalia
• Sudan
• South Sudan
• Syria
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Yemen
• Afghanistan
• Central African Republic
• Haiti
• Chad

These countries rank highest on the Fragile States Index, reflecting extreme vulnerability due to conflict, displacement, weak governance, and humanitarian crises. World Vision does not currently operate in Yemen due to access and security constraints.

The Fragile States Index

One of the resources we use to create a fragility framework is the Fund for Peace, which publishes an annual report called the Fragile States Index (FSI). The FSI uses 12 factors to measure the level of social, economic and political pressures that each country faces each year. The FSI was created in 2005 to rank 178 countries on their vulnerability to conflict or collapse based on how they score from zero to 10 on the following indicators:

• Security Apparatus
• Factionalized Elites
• Group Grievance
• Economic Decline and Property
• Uneven Economic Development
• Human Flight and Brain Drain
• State Legitimacy
• Public Services
• Human Rights and Rule of Law
• Demographic Pressures
• Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons
• External Intervention

The higher the total score, the more fragile – or unstable – the state.

Getting the big picture

The FSI is a tool that gives us a snapshot of the conditions each country faces from one year to the next to see whether they’re improving or worsening. This data is used:

• To measure the contributions of foreign governments and non-governmental organizations toward development initiatives.
• To help focus aid efforts toward areas that need further development and support.
• By the private sector and financial institutions to assess and mitigate the risks involved when investing or operating in a certain country.
• By governments to better understand and address their own challenges.
• By human rights or local civil society groups to advocate for reform.

Check out the Fragile States Index website to get the latest statistics on all countries measured by the FSI.

Common characteristics of fragile states

While each country faces its own unique challenges, the most dangerous places on earth often share common characteristics that contribute to their fragile state.

Conflict and Displacement

Today, due to armed conflict, disaster, and violence:

• Over 122.1 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide, including 36.8 million refugees, according to the UNHCR Global Trends Report.
• Nearly 70% of all refugees come from just five countries: Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and South Sudan.
• 67% of refugees flee to neighboring countries such as Iran, Türkiye, Colombia, Germany, and Uganda —many of which are themselves facing high levels of fragility and humanitarian strain.
• According to UNICEF, 49 million children are currently displaced due to conflict and violence. Additionally, nearly 1 in 5 children globally—about 473 million—live in conflict zones, facing threats to their safety, education, and well-being.

These numbers tell us that we’re experiencing levels of forced displacement around the world that haven’t been seen since World War II. If migrants are seeking refuge in places that are only a little less fragile than the homes they left behind, is it possible to rebuild their lives? How long can host countries sustain an influx of refugees if they, too, are barely able to provide for their own populations?

Poverty

Although extreme poverty has been cut in half since 1990, fragile contexts remain at the heart of the global poverty challenge. According to the OECD’s States of Fragility 2025 report, 2 billion people now live in high or extreme fragility contexts—home to 72% of the world’s extreme poor.

In 2025, an estimated 415 million people living in fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS) are surviving on less than $3.00 per day, based on the updated international poverty line.

This marks a significant shift in global poverty dynamics, with poverty increasingly concentrated in regions facing instability, weak governance, and violence.

Looking ahead, the World Bank projects that by 2030, nearly 60% of the world’s extreme poor—around 436 million people—will reside in fragile states.

Sub-Saharan Africa will be the epicenter, hosting 80% of the global extreme poor, with Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo alone expected to account for one in four of those affected.

But living in poverty doesn’t just mean a lack of income or resources – it means people lack access to basic services like healthcare, security and education. Poverty deprives people of food and nutrition, their social standing and a voice in the decision-making process.

Extreme poverty makes it difficult to shake off fragility, but it can be done. While the World Bank estimates that it can take between 20-40 years to reverse fragility, more than a dozen states have successfully transitioned out of this perilous ranking over the last decade.

Weak political infrastructure

In 2025, Venezuela emerged as one of the countries that fell into the FSI’s Most Worsened category. Some of the factors that led to this event include:

• heavy dependence on the country’s oil production to generate income, despite decreased global demand leading to plunging oil prices; Venezuela’s oil production averaged 1.39 million barrels per day in early 2025—a 19.7% increase from 2024.
• a rapidly shrinking local economy further exacerbating the nation’s deep recession; inflation surged to 71.7% by the end of 2024, and the fiscal deficit reached -12.6% of GDP.
• a government accused of corruption and fraud, leading to a dispute over who is the country’s rightfully elected president; the 2024 presidential election was widely contested, with opposition candidate Edmundo González reportedly winning, but Nicolás Maduro declared the victor and sworn in for a third term in January 2025.
• a humanitarian crisis caused by hyperinflation and shortages of food, basic goods and medicine; over 20 million Venezuelans live in multidimensional poverty, and 14.2 million face severe humanitarian needs.
• mass exodus of Venezuelans hoping to escape unemployment, rampant violence and poverty; more than 6.87 million Venezuelans now reside in Latin America and the Caribbean, with 5.1 million granted residence permits or regular stay.

Power struggles in fragile and conflict-affected regions make it difficult for humanitarian aid agencies to help people caught in the political crossfire. And, while the most vulnerable tend to suffer the most, international action to address serious human rights violations and children’s rights is rare.

Climate stress

Countries that struggle with fragility tend to feel the impact of climate change and natural disasters more keenly than others that rank lower on the FSI. In fact, they often intensify a fragile country’s existing vulnerabilities and/or create new ones.

It’s not uncommon for most highly fragile states to experience a combination of climate hazards, like:

• floods
• wildfires
• chronic drought
• rainfall anomalies
• cyclones
• coastal inundation

Climate change affects countries in various ways and at different levels of intensity. But when fragile contexts experience multiple hazards on the fragility and climate fronts, the diverse threats and required responses can put a major strain on the country’s limited resources. And when governments are forced to prioritize one issue over another due to lack of resources, the cycle of fragility just keeps going.

Poor access to healthcare

The World Health Organization states that half of the world’s population can’t access essential health services – not necessarily because they live in the world’s poorest countries, but because their governments do not prioritize developing their health-care systems.

It can take years to rebuild the health-care system of a country that has been ravaged by war. Health-care systems in countries like South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been impaired by decades of fighting, weak infrastructure and lack of human and financial resources.

According to the 2025 Fragile States Index, South Sudan remains one of the most fragile countries in the world, ranking third overall with a score of 109.0, just behind Somalia and Sudan.

On May 3, 2025, an attack on Old Fangak Hospital disrupted services for over 120,000 people, leaving pregnant women, trauma patients, and 1,200 children without care. But, with a government that only allocates two per cent of its national budget toward the health ministry, even those living in urban centres will have a difficult time accessing adequate medical care when they need it.

The country is also battling a cholera outbreak with nearly 50,000 cases and 919 deaths reported between September 2024 and April 2025.

The health-care situation in the DRC is just as dire. Most Congolese have little or no access to health care due to a 30-year-long collapse of the country’s economic and political infrastructure. While certain parts of the country are no longer at war, the DRC endured the world’s second deadliest Ebola outbreak in 2019, causing unimaginable suffering to the thousands of people who were affected.

Survive. Adapt. Thrive: World Vision’s approach to fragility

World Vision is working in some of the most dangerous places in the world – including Afghanistan, Iraq, Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo – to help people rise above their circumstances using a fragile contexts program approach.

Survive

When disasters strike, we help people in crisis meet their immediate needs by providing:

• Food and non-food items
• Health and nutrition
• Water and sanitation
• Shelter
• Protection
• Information

Adapt

As unstable situations improve, we help institutions to re-establish essential services to communities. We also help people to:

• Rebuild or diversify livelihoods
• Identify risks, develop preparedness plans and implement early warning systems
• Restore community infrastructure
• Reconcile relationships and build trust between diverse groups
• Access education, wash, health and nutrition, community-based child protection
• Hold us accountable to the core humanitarian standard

Thrive

Once crisis situations become increasingly stable, we activate our thrive response to increase the resilience of children and communities to build a better future. We help people to:

• Address their priorities for child well-being
• Address underlying causes of fragility
• (Re) Establish positive relationships across divisions
• Hold the state accountable for provision of quality basic services

We also work shoulder to shoulder with institutions and faith leaders to:

• Rehabilitate governance and service provision
• Restore relations between communities and the institutions that govern them
• Address structures that create fragility
• Promote positive social norms and behaviours
• Build interfaith relations

You can help

Life in fragile states can change in an instant, leaving children and families vulnerable to circumstances beyond their control. But it’s also possible for an unsafe situation to quickly stabilize–with support. Your help matters and makes a real impact.

When you become a monthly Real Impact partner, your support enables World Vision to meet the immediate needs of those living in the world’s most dangerous places. Together, we can help make sure that children living in these fragile regions have what they need to survive, rebuild their lives and hope for a better future.

This article was written by Melanie Ramos in 2020 and updated by Wolston Lobo in August 2025.