5 September - Around the world, over 800 million people live in extreme poverty and 1.1 billion people are still living in multidimensional poverty. As part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, efforts are ongoing to improve the situation and to once and for all eradicate poverty. But why does the way we measure poverty matter for global efforts towards its eradication? We asked Sabina Alkire, Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at the University of Oxford, to explain.
Why does the way we measure poverty matter?
“We measure poverty, fundamentally, to provide essential information required to guide actions that reduce poverty and to evaluate whether poverty has gone down.
One aspect of poverty is clearly monetary. As Amartya Sen put it, money is a general-purpose means that enables people to access many important things. However, many people cannot build a road if there is none nearby, nor build and run a school or health clinic or create decent jobs for their family. They might not even be able to draw water or electricity to their house or improve its flooring and fix the roof.
We measure multidimensional poverty to guide actions for people whose capabilities are constrained in several overlapping ways (maybe related to health and nutrition, education, housing, work or security) at the same time.”
In your work, you address the measurement of multidimensional poverty. What does that mean?
“Following Sen again, a poverty measure first sets the space or ingredients of poverty. A multidimensional poverty index – or MPI – usually consults the protagonists (people experiencing poverty) as well as government actors and identifies a core set of deprivations that tend to comprise poverty.
Next a measure identifies who is poor. In our case, people who have a critical mass of deprivations at the same time are identified as multidimensionally poor. It aggregates this information across people so that we can assess which groups are poorest – by age, location, gender, disability status, race and ethnicity and so on. Anti-poverty actions can then target the poorest groups or households.
To guide actions that reduce poverty, we break down MPI by its component indicators. Knowing the structure of poverty – how many poor people are deprived in each indicator, and which indicator combinations are most common – empowers actors to design cost-effective and integrated policy responses.
Finally, the measures are updated regularly, to see whether poverty reduced, and whether the poorest groups reduced poverty the fastest – which means poverty reduction can be celebrated as leaving no one behind, and new goals set for the next period.”
What opportunities does the Second World Summit for Social Development (WSSD2) create in this area?
“MPIs, which emerged since the 1995 Copenhagen World Summit for Social Development (WSSD1), are a potentially powerful and central tool to advance WSSD2 aims. We hope that WSSD2 will create opportunities to share the potential contribution that multidimensional poverty metrics can have going forward – for example by advancing multiple interconnected SDGs efficiently until 2030 and LNOB.
We hope that future global goals will assess poverty reduction using absolute and relative changes, and changes in the number of people living in poverty – so the diagnoses of success acknowledge progress in the poorest places. And we hope that WSSD2 will also engage MPIs, as much current research does, when overlaying poverty and climate hazards, analysing gendered patterns of poverty, discussing left-behind groups like children, and prioritising poverty data needs.
In fiscally tight times, we need clear, accurate, highly policy relevant metrics that illuminate WSSD2’s high priority areas and diagnose success. MPI might be an option to consider.”
For more information on MPIs: What is the global MPI?
For details on WSSD2: Second World Summit on Social Development
Sabina Alkire is Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford; and a member of the Committee for Development Policy (CDP).