UNDP/2020 MPI: Tackling multidimensional poverty at risk

London, August 2 (HNA) – New figures released today show that before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, progress was being made in tackling multidimensional poverty, according to the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), a measure that looks beyond income to include access to safe water, education, electricity, food and six other indicators. Now that progress is at risk.

As Multidimensional Poverty Index could not be calculated for Turkey due to lack of data, Turkey was not included in the 2020 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index Report.

The lives of poor people are an intricate balance; their steps out of poverty even more so. Millions of daily labourers, herders and farmers eking out subsistence on rugged terrain have no access to clean drinking water and no electric light at home.

Street vendors’ children may be undernourished, and entire families illiterate. In tough times many children drop out of school. Improvements may come—an electrification scheme, better water and sanitation, upgraded schools with lunch programmes, and good local health clinics. But conflicts, migrations, disasters and shocks also threaten.

Launched in 2010 by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at the University of Oxford and the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme for the flagship Human Development Reports, the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) measures the complexities of poor people’s lives, individually and collectively, each year.

This report—released 10 years after that launch—focuses on how multidimensional poverty has declined. It provides a comprehensive picture of global trends in multidimensional poverty, covering 5 billion people. It probes patterns between and within countries and by indicator, showcasing different ways of making progress.

Together with data on the $1.90 a day poverty rate, the trends monitor global poverty in different forms. This is a key moment to study how nonmonetary poverty goes down. It is 10 years before 2030, the due date of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), whose first goal is to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. And it is a year when a pandemic and economic slowdown are pushing many more into poverty, while the spectre of racism still haunts, and environmental threats such as locusts surge.

Key findings
• Across 107 developing countries, 1.3 billion people—22 percent—live in multidimensional poverty.

• Children show higher rates of multidimensional poverty: half of multidimensionally poor people (644 million) are children under age 18. One in three children is poor compared with one in six adults.

• About 84.3 percent of multidimensionally poor people live in Sub-Saharan Africa (558 million) and South Asia (530 million).

• 67 percent of multidimensionally poor people are in middle-income countries, where the incidence of multidimensional poverty ranges from 0 percent to 57 percent nationally and from 0 percent to 91 percent subnationally.

• Every multidimensionally poor person is being left behind in a critical mass of indicators. For example, 803 million multidimensionally poor people live in a household where someone is undernourished, 476 million have an out-of-school child at home, 1.2 billion lack access to clean cooking fuel, 687 million lack electricity and 1.03 billion have substandard housing materials.

• 107 million multidimensionally poor people are age 60 or older—a particularly importantly figure during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• 65 countries reduced their global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) value significantly in absolute terms. Those countries are home to 96 percent of the population of the 75 countries studied for poverty trends. The fastest, Sierra Leone (2013–2017), did so during the Ebola epidemic.

• Four countries halved their MPI value. India (2005/2006–2015/2016) did so nationally and among children and had the biggest reduction in the number of multidimensionally poor people (273 million). Ten countries, including China, came close to halving their MPI value.

• In nearly a third of the countries studied, either there was no reduction in multidimensional poverty for children, or the MPI value fell more slowly for children than for adults.

• The countries with the fastest reduction in MPI value in absolute terms were Sierra Leone, Mauritania and Liberia, followed by Timor-Leste, Guinea and Rwanda. North Macedonia had the fastest relative poverty reduction, followed by China, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Turkmenistan and Mongolia. Each of these countries cut its original MPI value by at least 12 percent a year.

• In 14 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of multidimensionally poor people
increased, even though their MPI value decreased, because of population growth.

• How countries reduced their MPI value varies by indicator and by subnational region.
Twenty countries significantly reduced deprivations for every indicator. Bangladesh, Lao
People’s Democratic Republic and Mauritania had pro-poor reductions in subnational regions.
• Multidimensional poverty trends do not match monetary poverty trends, suggesting different drivers.

• Charting trends in multidimensional and monetary poverty measures and using global data and national statistics, as Atkinson (2019) proposed, provides an overall picture of a country’s poverty situation.

• Before the pandemic 47 countries were on track to halve poverty between 2015 and 2030, if observed trends continued. But 18 countries, including some of the poorest, were off track.