Poverty is not just about money. Oxford University inBritain says poverty also means not having enough food, education,healthcare and shelter.
Earlier this month, Oxford University released its latest measure of poverty. It is called the Multidimensional Poverty Index, or MPI. Researchers gatheredinformation from 108 countries, where 78 percent of the world’s populationlives. Oxford says about 1.6 billion of those people are what it calls “multi-dimensionally poor.” It says most live in rural areas.
Sabina Alkire is the head of the Oxford Poverty and Human DevelopmentInitiative. She describes multidimensional poverty.
“I mean a person who has different things going wrong at the same time. Theymight not have many assets and they might have malnutrition. And they mightnot have more than five years of schooling. So, several things are going wrongin their life at the same time. That’s what it means to be multi-dimensionallypoor. It’s not just one.”
The MPI found that in nearly 50 developing countries, half of the poor peopleshould be called “destitute” -- in other words, having an extreme lack of basicliving standards.
About 420 million people are considered destitute. Most of them live in SouthAsia. About 343 million live in India. The MPI found there are 200 milliondestitute people in 24 African countries. Niger has the highest percentage of its population listed as destitute -- almost 69 percent.
An individual’s earnings is the most common measure of poverty. But Dr.Alkire says more information is needed to tell the whole story.
“It needs a measure that looks at the other aspects of people’s life -- like badhealth, bad education, no water and sanitation, or poor housing -- and seeshow they’re doing in those. Because actually it’s not the same people who arepoor in both. And so both measures together give a more-balanced picture ofhow people are living.”
She says that in some places, many people have a poor diet, but are notconsidered poor.
“For example, in Bhutan, according to their national poverty measure, 12percent of people are income poor and 12.7 are multi-dimensionally poor, butonly a quarter of those -- 3.2 percent -- are poor in both.”
But she believes that policies aimed at reducing poverty are working.
“We studied changes over time for 34 countries this year, housing 2.5 billionpeople. And 30 of those countries had significant reductions of poverty. And the really good news we find is that it’s low-income countries and least-developed countries that actually reduced poverty the fastest.”
