ity (2009, 2). World Bank data also show that the general poverty rate for ethnic minority groups in Vietnam in 2006 was 52 percent, more than five times that of ethnic majority groups (Dang 2010). The country made some reforms in recent years to address the problem, but the economic divide between the majority Kinh and the ethnic minorities— as highlighted by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (UNCERD 2012)—is still profound, even when those groups live in the same mountainous area.

“Institutionalized discrimination is bad for people and for societies. Widespread discrimination is also bad for economies. There is clear evidence that when societies enact laws that prevent productive people from fully participating in the workforce, economies suffer.” Jim Yong Kim, president, World Bank Group (Kim 2014) In 2013, the United Nations independent expert (now special rapporteur on minority issues) warned that hundreds of minority groups in Africa were in need of attention and protection because minorities remain among the poorest people, trapping them in a cycle of discrimination, exclusion, poverty, and underdevelopment.<sup>13</sup> As reported by Minority Rights Group International, the Batwa people, a pastoralist minority in the Great Lakes Region in Africa, are among the poorest of the poor. A combination of lack of access to cultivable lands, poor health, and poor education places them as one of the most marginalized and poorest minorities on the continent.<sup>14</sup> Similarly, indigenous peoples (who include about 5 percent of the world’s population) are estimated to represent 15 percent of the world’s poor (Hall and Patrinos 2012). In Mexico, as in most Latin American countries, they consistently rank lower than nonindigenous peoples on poverty indicators (Garcia-Moreno and Patrinos 2011). As noted by the World Bank Latin America and the Caribbean [LAC] Equity lab, “Even if the Latin American and Caribbean region has seen significant progress in terms of poverty reduction over the past decade, the indigenous populations have benefited little and remain among the poorest in LAC. In some areas, the difference in poverty between them and other groups has grown even wider.”<sup>15</sup> Also, a recent World Bank study shows that from the early to the late 2000s, although the proportion of indigenous people living in moderate poverty (US$4/day) and extreme poverty (US$2.50/day) has decreased, the poverty gap between indigenous and nonindigenous people increased by 32 percent in Bolivia, 13 percent in Ecuador, and 99 percent in Brazil, but in Guatemala the gap decreased 0.36 percent. As a result of those gaps, in the Latin American countries for which data are available, the proportion of indigenous households living in poverty today (a) still doubles the proportion of nonindigenous households living in poverty, (b) is 2.7 times as high for extreme poverty, and (c) is three times as high for people living on less than US$1.25 a day (see figure 1).<sup>16</sup>

> 13 UNOHCHR 2014b, paras. 17 and 31, <u>https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G14/100/72/PDF/G1410072 .pdf?OpenElement.</u>

> 14 Minority Rights Group International  2008.

> 15 See LAC Equity Lab, “Overview,” http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/lac-equity-lab1/overview.

> 16 World Bank 2015a, 59.

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