Over 50 countries developing new approach to ending poverty
Launched in 2013, the MPPN has 51 participating countries, over 30 of which attended the fourth annual meeting in Mexico on 8-9 November 2016. This was the first meeting since the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were approved by the United Nations. Participants shared how their work on multidimensional poverty provides a very concrete set of activities by which to advance the SDGs with their multi-dimensional vision of poverty, creating effective multi-sectoral and integrated policy responses and clarifying precise but feasible requirements for improved data.
The meetings offer a space for South-South exchange, and sharing was extensive, with over 30 presentations offered. During the meetings, Ministers and senior speakers shared the groundbreaking work on multidimensional poverty underway in Colombia, China, Ecuador, South Africa, Chile, Seychelles, Costa Rica, Honduras, Paraguay, Morocco, Peru, and Tunisia. Mexico offered a pre-conference training by the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL) on institutionalizing and communicating multidimensional poverty measures, and Mexican ministers shared their experiences in using multidimensional poverty measures to guide policy in a panel. Additional in-depth perspectives on policy uses of MPIs were offered by OPHI, China, South Africa, Costa Rica, and Colombia. Countries who shared fascinating work-in-progress on MPI included Argentina, Chad, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Cote d'Ivoire, Jamaica, Panama, St Lucia, and Uganda. Country voices were complemented by keynote speakers included Luis Felipe Lopez Calva of the World Bank, Heike Kuhn of BMZ, and Martin Evans of UNICEF, as well as Khalid Abu-Ismail of UN-ESCWA. The detailed agenda may be found here.
Participants also agreed to a five point communique that, among other things, endorsed the use of the MPI in the SDGs for example to track Target 1.2 and agreed to support the development of additional national MPIs, to energise policies that address the interlinked aspects of poverty, to develop further policy tools that link to multidimensional measures, as well as to continue to build the network and use MPI to shape the programming of other international actors.
The event also saw the launch of a new MPPN website – in both English and Spanish – as well as a new magazine, Dimensions, full of policy applications of MPI and country studies – and a set of in-depth policy briefings. In the future, these new publications will enable countries to share with each other in greater detail how they are using the MPI for resource allocation, policy coordination, and so on.
