Global coverage of national MPIs increasing as 2030 draws closer

Global coverage of national Multidimensional Poverty Indices (MPIs) looks set to advance this year with recent launches by Samoa, Mauritania and Belize and more scheduled to follow over the summer.

The launch of national MPIs is especially welcome in the year where UN Member States take stock of their progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda. These include targets to eradicate extreme poverty and halve ‘the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions’ (SDG 1.2).

The national MPIs launched by the national statistics offices of the Governments of Samoa, Mauritania and Belize all recognise the importance of complementing monetary measures with assessments of multidimensional poverty to guide more efficient poverty reduction policies. National MPIs are carefully tailored to track poverty in their context and so the structure and indicators selected for each MPI differ from country to country according to national priorities and available data. Typically, health, education and living standards form core dimensions in many national MPIs. To these, Samoa, Mauritania and Belize all add employment.

While it is not possible to directly compare different national MPIs, some common themes emerge from the findings of these national measures. Notably, rural areas are poorer than urban areas. In Samoa, the incidence of rural poverty – prominent in the North West Upolu, Rest of Upolu and Sav regions – is reported to be 28.1%, whereas urban poverty – represented in the Apia Urban Area region – is 11.4%. In Belize, the incidence of multidimensional poverty in rural communities is double that of urban communities. In Mauritania, nearly eight out of ten people (77.1 per cent) live in multidimensional poverty in rural areas.

Beyond urban and rural areas, all MPIs are disaggregated by subnational regions and other categories. For example, Belize estimates find that the country’s younger population, larger households, households with children, households with a head who was either unemployed or underemployed, and households with a head who had only completed primary education, or who had not completed primary education, were more likely to be multidimensionally poor. Mauritania’s MPI (or IPM-M) also highlights child poverty. In Mauritania, children aged 0 to 17 represent more than half (50.7%) of the population and constitute the poorest age group with 61.9% living in multidimensional poverty. The value of their MPI is 0.352, the highest among all age groups.

Countries with MPIs are encouraged to under Indicator 1.2.2. of the SDG Indicator database which will be updated this spring, and to include levels of multidimensional poverty in Voluntary National Reviews at this year’s High Level Political Forum in 10–19 July 2023. Statistical Offices without national MPIs are encouraged to report multidimensional poverty levels shared in the global Multidimensional Poverty Index.

More information:

• Samoa MPI 2022 Report
  Recording of the launch event of Samoa MPI (Samoa Bureau of Statistics)
• Mauritania MPI Policy Brief
  Recording of launch of Mauritania MPI (IPM-M) and subsequent discussion (Agence Nationale de la Statistique, de l’Anlayse Démographique et Économique)
• Belize MPI announcement
  Recording of Belize MPI launch and presentations (Statistical Institute of Belize)
• More info on reporting multidimensional poverty data in the global SDG Indicator database