Poverty in Sri Lanka is 4%. Sri Lanka's life expectancy and literacy rate are nearly on par with those of developed countries, and even top the rankings for the South Asia region. While all these indicate that Sri Lanka should be experiencing a high standard of living, until recently it has only ranked in the medium category of the Human Development Index (HDI). This is despite the fact that Sri Lanka has been experiencing moderate growth in its GDP averaging 5.5 per annum between 2006 and 2009. One of the reasons is due to its relatively low GDP per capital;. The Sri Lankan government has been successful in reducing poverty from 15.2% on 2006 to 8.9% in 2010, urban poverty was reduced from 6.7 to 5.3% while rural poverty was reduced from 15.7 to 9.5%, and the nation has made significant progress towards achieving Millennium Development Goals on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger. Population As of 2010, 8.9% of the population lives below the poverty line. This is evidence that while acute poverty is no longer an issue, poverty still remains widespread and continues to be a challenging problem in Sri Lanka. More worryingly however is the fact that 90% of the poor live in rural areas, with over 80% of Sri Lanka's population still living in rural areas. But in 2013 it has shown that the economy is growing more rapidly than in any other Asian country. This highlights a link between isolation from social and economic infrastructure, cities and markets, and higher levels of poverty incidence. One explanation could be that it limits these people from earning income through off-farm activities. In addition, with more than 40 per cent of the rural poor people being small farmers, their production systems may be hampered by the usual suspects of fragmented landholdings, poor economies of scale, low investment levels resulting from poor financial services as well as inappropriate or limited technology. According to the Asian Development Bank, the population of Sri Lanka was 19.71 million in 2015. In 2014, 6.7% of the country lived below the national poverty line. During the same year, it was also reported that 50.5% of the population aged 15 years and above were employed. Development In 2008, it was reported that tens of thousands of men from impoverished villages were joining the Sri Lanka Armed Forces and Sri Lanka Police Service to escape rural poverty,