Measuring poverty to establish progress

The multidimentional Poverty Index (MPI) is the official measure of the proportion of men, women and children living in poverty according to national definitions.

The multidimentional Poverty Index (MPI) is the official measure of the proportion of men, women and children living in poverty according to national definitions.

Published Aug 26, 2020

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By Pali Lehohla

JOHANNESBURG – The multidimentional Poverty Index (MPI) is the official measure of the proportion of men, women and children living in poverty according to national definitions.

Nobel Laurette Amarty Sen once wrote that human lives are battered and diminished in different ways. Sen said the first task is to acknowledge that such deprivations have to be accommodated within a general overarching framework.

The drive to formalise measurement of poverty was given a significant boost by the Alkire-Foster method.

This cutting-edge methodology caught the attention of mostly Latin American governments which started using it in their policy design, planning, programme execution and impact assessment.

Former Costa Rican president Luis Guillermo Solís Rivera issued a presidential decree that MPI must be part of the future allocation formulae after the 2015 MPI showed big mismatches between policy objectives and allocations.

Solis sent a clear message of what Costa Ricans treasured.

The MPI was ultimately launched in Oxford in 2013.

Former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos is a fellow at Oxford and works with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) closely.

His presidency is credited for peace building in Columbia, using MPI to establish progress against poverty for marginalised communities.

In time, the OPHI created the Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network (MPPN). Last week, the network convened again to discuss progress on reportage and a sample of countries made presentations.

Ghana Statistical Service, which launched its MPI in July, noted that 45.6 percent of the country’s population are multidimensionally poor.

It said contributing indicators were the lack of health insurance coverage, undernutrition, school lag and households with members without any educational qualification.

The highest multidimensional poverty in the Maldives is the Central Region driven by deprivations in years of schooling, access to the internet and safe drinking water.

With the science of the Alkire-Foster method and more than

76 countries part of the MPPN, the Inter Agency Expert Group, which consists of members of the UN Statistics Commission and national statistics offices, has accepted the MPI as a measure of multidimensional poverty.

In South Africa, the limited years of schooling exposes the population to high levels of unemployment that contribute to almost two thirds of the drivers of poverty.

Dr Pali Lehohla is the former statistician-general of South Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.

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