News from our organization
Global Rize releases Ranking List of Unreached People
News from our organization
Global Rize releases Ranking List of Unreached People
News from our organization
Global Rize releases Ranking List of Unreached People
Every year GlobalRize releases the Ranking List of Unreached People. The Ranking List of 2023 consists of peoples with less than one percent Christians. The twenty people groups on the list comprise as much as ten percent of the world’s population. In fifteen out of twenty groups, only less than one in a thousand are Christians. The Bengalis top the list.
At the top of the list of unreached peoples are the Bengalis from Bangladesh. With 157 million people, there are more than twice as many Bengalis as any other unreached population group.
The rest of the top five unreached peoples are the Shaikh (India), the Turks, the Yadav (India) and the Sunda (Indonesia). It is striking that the entire list published by GlobalRize, which consists of only twenty peoples, still comprises ten percent of the world’s population. 34 percent of the world’s population is unreached by the gospel and divided among more than 6,000 people groups. But only twenty groups, each with more than seventeen million people, account for ten percent.
Another thing that stands out about the list is how unreached many of them are. The criterion for being included on the list was that fewer than one in a hundred people in a people group are Christians. But fifteen out of the twenty groups turn out to have even less than one in a thousand Christians.
Peoples from India occupy a special place on the list. The first ranking released by GlobalRize in 2021 showed that India is the country with by far the highest number of unreached people. This is confirmed by this list of nations: eight of the twenty nations can be found in India. The names of most groups will be unknown to most people. It should be noted, however, that in India in particular it is very difficult to define what a people is. Besides language, culture and caste play an important role. But the challenge for missions in India is evidenced by the fact that about 2,000 of India’s 2,300 peoples are unreached.
In addition to the people groups of India, who are all Hindu except one, the list mainly includes Muslim peoples. With eleven of the twenty, they form a majority on the list.
Fourteen missions and four support organizations in The Netherlands have joined forces with the #NoChoice campaign to draw attention to the unreached. They are also committed to the proclamation of the gospel among the unreached peoples of this list. For example, the OMF sends church planters to the Isaan in Thailand; Gospel Recordings has audio messages in every language on the list; Pioneers has listed teams among the various Arab nations; and Frontiers is active among the Bengalis, the largest unreached people. GlobalRize has started new projects in the past year in the languages of three of the groups on the list: the Hausa and Fulani in Nigeria, and the Tajiks in Afghanistan.
* We largely follow the Joshua Project format when compiling the ranking list. This means that peoples living in more than one country are counted several times. If that did not happen, the number of people groups would drop to about 10,000. Cultural differences are also taken into account. If peoples were classified purely by language, there are about 7,000.
The list is topped by the Bengalis from Bangladesh. With 157 million people, it is a hugely unreached group.
The twenty peoples on the list comprise as much as ten percent of the world’s population. That is a high percentage, when you consider that there are 16,000 peoples on earth, of which 6,000 are unreached by the gospel.
In fifteen of the twenty groups on the list, less than one in a thousand people is Christian. So they are very unreached.
Eight of the twenty people groups on the list are found in India.
GlobalRize has started new projects in the past year in the languages of three of the peoples on the list: the Hausa and the Fulani in Nigeria, and the Tajiks in Afghanistan.
