Peer Network member El Salvador pilots multidimensional poverty measure

El Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa has published an article on a new poverty measure being developed in the country. The article, in Spanish, cites the Technical Secretariat of the Presidency of El Salvador (STP) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in the country as the main developers of a multidimensional methodology for poverty measurement in the country.

The Government of El Salvador in collaboration with the UNDP had considered various measures before piloting a multidimensional poverty measure that has been used to generate new data. The process has been carried out over two years and it is expected that the measure will be launched in 2014, according to William Pleitez, the Chief Economist at UNDP, El Salvador. The country is a member of the Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network launched in Oxford, in June 2013.

OPHI Director Sabina Alkire was interviewed by La Prensa in her role as adviser to the government of El Salvador on multidimensional poverty. Alkire explained the importance of adding poverty measures that go beyond income in capturing the full experience of poverty, and lauded the government’s two-year effort to collate information from poor people on the dimensions of poverty relevant to their lives.

You can read the full article in La Prensa, in Spanish, here, while the interview with Alkire is available to read here. Find out more about the Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network and its members here.