United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has released a worrisome report, giving details of the multidimensional poverty index (MPI), 2023, level in over more than 100 countries, indicating the worst in the history of mankind, even as part of the report titled. “Unstacking global poverty: Data for high-impact action’ reads:
“The global MPI is a key international resource that measures acute multidimensional poverty across more than 100 developing countries. First launched in 2010 by HDRO and OPHI, the global MPI advances SDG 1—ending poverty in all its forms everywhere— and measures interconnected deprivations across indicators related to SDGs”.
It further indicated, “The global MPI begins by constructing a deprivation profile for each household and person in it that tracks deprivations in 10 indicators spanning health, education and standard of living . For example, a household and all people living in it are deprived if any child is stunted or any child or adult for whom data are available is underweight; if any child died in the past five years; if any school-aged child is not attending school up to the age at which he or she would complete class 8 or no household member has completed six years of schooling; or if the household lacks access to electricity, an improved source of drinking water within a 30 minute walk round trip,1 an improved sanitation facility that is not shared,2 nonsolid cooking fuel, durable housing materials, and basic assets such as a radio, animal cart, phone, television, computer, refrigerator, bicycle or motorcycle”.
“Across 110 countries, 1.1 billion of 6.1 billion people are poor. Understanding where poor people live is crucial for policymaking. Roughly five out of six poor people live in Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia: 534 million (47.8 percent) in Sub-Saharan Africa and 389 million (34.9 percent) in South Asia.
Some 65 percent of the remaining poor people live in just five countries: China (2014), Indonesia (2017), Myanmar (2015/16), Sudan (2014) and Yemen (2013). More recent data for these countries would allow their global MPI value to be updated to reflect current conditions. Across countries the incidence of poverty ranges from less than 1 percent in 21 countries to over 50 percent in 22 countries, 19 of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa, including the poorest four: Burundi (75.1 percent in 2016/2017), Central African Republic (80.4 percent in 2018/2019), Chad (84.2 percent in 2019) and Niger (91 percent in 2012)”.
There is also extensive variation across regions. Every region has at least one country with incidence below 1 percent. The countries with the highest incidence in their region are Afghanistan (55.9 percent in 2015/2016), Haiti (41.3 percent in 2016/2017), Niger (91 percent in 2012), Papua New Guinea (56.6 percent in 2016/2018), Sudan (52.3 percent in 2014) and Tajikistan (7.4 percent in 2017).
These countries urgently require updated data. Poverty disproportionately affects low-income countries. They are home to only 10 percent of the population covered by the global MPI but 34.7 percent (387 million) of poor people (figure 3). Some 65.3 percent of poor people (730 million) live in middle-income countries, where the incidence of poverty ranges from 0.1 percent in Serbia (in 2019) to 66.8 percent in Benin (in 2017/2018) at the national level and from 0.0 percent in Jaweng, Botswana (in 2015/2016), to 89.5 percent in Alibori, Benin (in 2017/2018) at the subnational level. The fact that most poor people live in countries that have shifted to middle-income status (as measured by gross national income per capita), highlights the importance of looking at both national and disaggregated data”.
It is noted that the annual global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), jointly published by the Human Development Report Office (HDRO) of the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford since 2010, measures interlinked deprivations in health, education and standard of living that directly affect a person’s life and wellbeing. The global MPI is the only counting-based index that measures overlapping deprivations for more than 100 countries and 1,200 subnational regions and offers a key perspective on SDG, while encompassing indicators related to other SDGs.
The global MPI can be pictured as a stack of blocks, each of which represents a deprivation of a poor person. The goal is to eliminate deprivations so the height of the stack declines. This report presents a compact update on the state of multidimensional poverty (henceforth referred to as “poverty”) in the world. It compiles data from 110 developing countries covering 6.1 billion people, accounting for 92 percent of the population in developing countries. It tells an important and persistent story about how prevalent poverty is in the world and provides insights into the lives of poor people, their deprivations and how intense their poverty is—to inform and accelerate efforts to end poverty in all its forms. As still only a few countries have data from after the COVID-19 pandemic, the report urgently calls for updated multidimensional poverty data . And while providing a sobering annual stock take of global poverty, the report also highlights examples of success in every region. Among the 1.1 billion poor people … Who are the poorest? The higher the incidence of poverty, the higher the intensity of poverty that poor people experience. 485 million poor people live in severe poverty across 110 countries, experiencing 50–100% of weighted deprivations. • 99 million poor people experience deprivations in all three dimensions (70–100% of weighted deprivations). 10 million of the 12 million poor people with the highest deprivation scores (90–100%) live in SubSaharan Africa. Which groups are the poorest? . Subnational regions are being left behind in two ways: where poverty is widespread, poverty is also most intense. • Half of the 1.1 billion poor people (566 million) are children under 18 years of age. • 84% of all poor people live in rural areas. Rural areas are poorer than urban areas in every world region