The prognosis is mixed for meeting the Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of extreme poverty from 1990 levels by 2015. At the global level, this goal is still within reach: extreme poverty is expected to continue declining to around 12 percent of the global population in 2015. But many countries will not come close to meeting the MDG goal, particularly in Africa. One worrying trend is that severe and persistent poverty is increasingly concentrated in so-called fragile states -- countries that suffer from poor governance and weak institutions, are often enmeshed in civil conflict, and have little capacity to address poverty. In these states, poverty levels may actually increase to over 50 percent by 2015, as their citizens are shut out of the promising economic trends in other nations.