Leveraging the Transformative Power of Official Multidimensional Poverty Statistics for Social Development
The Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network (MPPN) is hosting a webinar on the transformative power of official multidimensional poverty statistics for social development. Directors of government statistics departments across the globe, and organisations, will share their experiences of how MPIs that are rigorous, transparent, and regularly updated have policy traction – and why this matters, especially in fiscally-constrained times. The aim of the event is to foster dialogue, build capacity, and strengthen cooperation to make progress towards sustainable development.
Understanding interlinkages across poverty-related deprivations, and responding with high-impact integrated policies, is pivotal in order to accelerate progress towards poverty eradication – SDG1. The Pact for the Future placed poverty eradication at the heart of efforts to achieve the 2030 Agenda, and called for measures that fully capture progress on sustainable development, and go beyond GDP. And this is the first theme of the World Summit on Social Development in Qatar. So how can statistics contribute vigorously now, in new and powerful ways?
A Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is a targeted and comprehensive measure designed to track progress towards SDG1 by tracking the multiple SDG-deprivations that poor people experience at the same time, to inform evidence-based policies. National MPIs are reported as SDG Indicator 1.2.2. The 2024 global SDG database publishes MPI data for 3 billion people in developing regions, and Eurostat contributes a simplified counting measure for an additional 34 countries to 1.2.2. In addition, countries like Moldova, Egypt and Somalia have launched their first national MPIs in winter 2024, and three countries are poised to launch early in 2025 with many others on track.
Statisticians and policy leaders have recognised that an MPI can be a high-impact policy tool. The current chair of the Elders and former president of Colombia, J.M. Santos, published an OUP book The Battle Against Poverty describing his use of their MPI statistic in policy to cut multidimensional poverty by one-third across five dimensions – health, education, living standards, employment, and children and youth – in eight years. The Government of Uzbekistan hosted the South-South meeting of a network of statisticians and policy actors that now includes 64 countries and 20 international institutions, to share success and to talk candidly through challenges; Somalia hosted a UN General Assembly Side Event on MPI. We must acknowledge that across the developing world, MPI statistics are motivating policy action – be it in India or Armenia, Thailand or Paraguay, Ghana, Samoa or Dominican Republic. And we must acknowledge that, unusually, statisticians worldwide are in active dialogue with statistics-users in government. This is a key situation to recognise and to deepen as we move towards the World Summit on Social Development and advance the SDGs and the Pact for Future.
About National and Global MPIs: Governments such as Afghanistan, Armenia, Bhutan, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ghana, Honduras, India, Malawi, Maldives, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka, VietNam and most recently, Somalia, Moldova, Egypt and Uruguay use National Multidimensional Poverty Indices (MPIs) as an official statistic of poverty, usually complementing national monetary poverty statistics. Each National MPI is tailor-made to the national context. For example, its design may reflect the constitution, or national development plan, or a participatory exploration of what poverty means. The National MPI is an official poverty statistic, and considerable effort is made so that it is used to inform and energise policy. Yet not all governments have National MPIs. Even when they do, National MPIs cannot be compared. So, there is a value-added to having an internationally comparable global MPI across developing countries and/or universally, with extensive and disaggregated information on the composition of poverty for different groups.
A global MPI for more than 100 developing countries has been estimated by OPHI and the UNDP’s Human Development Report Office since 2010 and is also disaggregated for subnational regions, as well as by variables like age and rural-urban areas. The most recent report in 2024 presents a compact update on the state of the world’s multidimensional poverty. It compiles data across 112 developing countries covering 6.3 billion people and accounting for 92% of the population in developing countries. It tells us an important and persistent story about how prevalent poverty is in the world, and provides insights into the lives of the poor, their deprivations and how intense their poverty is – to inform and accelerate efforts to end poverty in all its forms.
About the Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network (MPPN): The Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network is a South-South network of policymakers from countries and institutions interested in measuring and tackling multidimensional poverty. It was launched in June 2013 at a high-profile event at the University of Oxford, at which the former President of Colombia and Nobel Laureate Juan Manuel Santos and Professor Amartya Sen gave keynote addresses. The MPPN was established in response to demand for South-South exchange on implementing multidimensional measures, and for technical and institutional support. The Network Steering Committee includes Ministers and senior government officials from China, South Africa, Colombia and Bangladesh, as well as from OPHI.
'Leveraging the Transformative Power of Official Multidimensional Poverty Statistics for Social Development' is open to the public.
Speaker list forthcoming