When we think about the concept of poverty, we often associate the term with a lack of money or material goods. This idea about poverty originates from the relative nature of the term: what counts as ‘poverty’ in one context may completely vary from another. As such, the measures used to calculate poverty are often based on characteristics such as household income, which fail to capture more meaningful dimensions of poverty.
Multidimensional poverty is a term and system of measures developed to better describe and address the concept of poverty. This way of discussing poverty helps us consider how poverty impacts not only financial well-being, but all aspects of life. Multidimensional measures of poverty can and should be used to understand how poverty impacts peoples’ lives and to target our efforts to reduce or eliminate experiences of poverty.
What Does Multidimensional Poverty Mean?
The effects of poverty are not limited to one’s income, but also extend to one’s health, education, and standard of living. Multidimensional poverty takes into account how these different forms of deprivation collectively contribute to a lack of well-being. Monetary measures of poverty can miss the bigger picture about experiences of poverty. The Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative finds that not all individuals who are income poor are also multidimensionally poor. Similarly, not all multidimensionally poor individuals are income poor.
To break this down further, someone who is income poor may be able to access health services and universal education in certain societies where these are provided freely by the state. Meanwhile, other individuals who may not be income poor could still lack access to these other resources that mitigate the effects of income poverty. Having a high income relative to other citizens may not matter if these resources are widely inaccessible or nonexistent in a given society. Multidimensional poverty and monetary poverty together offer the most comprehensive understanding of which policies can help address deprivations faced by individuals in poverty.
Indicators of Deprivation
Rather than relying solely upon singular dimensions of poverty, a multidimensional poverty index incorporates measures of many types of deprivation. The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index averages levels of deprivation across three main dimensions: health, education, and living standards. To obtain scores for each of these dimensions, researchers take account of several indicators for each dimension. These indicators are explicitly related to the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations.
Although there are other ways to measure multidimensional poverty and additional indicators which other sources use, these indicators are fairly comprehensive. OPHI defines health as a combination of the prevalence of undernourishment and the rate of child mortality. Years in school and school attendance among minors comprise the OPHI measure of education. As the largest umbrella of indicators, living standards are measured by a number of indicators related to the household. These include the form of cooking fuel, quality and presence of water and sanitation facilities, access to electricity, quality of housing, and the assets that individuals own.
Why Poverty Should be Examined Multidimensionally
There are no one-size-fits-all approaches to solving the crisis of global poverty. What works in one context may be disastrous in another. Examples of this abound in policy decisions made by the leaders of nearly every country on Earth. We cannot simply address monetary poverty and assume this will have a universally positive impact. Economic growth does not always reduce poverty, nor does it lessen deprivation. It is essential that we understand deprivation to develop policies which can improve the well-being of citizens around the globe.
Beyond an analytical perspective on research and policy creation, we must understand poverty in the way that people who experience it do. The OPHI recognizes the importance of this perspective, and has published the findings of its focus groups of impoverished individuals. They find that poor people describe their experience of poverty as multidimensional, impacting all aspects of their personal and social lives. This participatory process highlights the dimensions of poverty that can be relevant to policies tailored to addressing forms of poverty in different societies.
Applying the Multidimensional Approach
The first step to creating more effective policies to reduce poverty is to learn about the multiplicative effects of poverty. Generating data on multidimensional deprivations can lead to policy advancements that are suited to the problems that specific places and people face. For example, a poverty reduction strategy implemented in urban areas within Hungary can and should look different from one developed for rural villages in El Salvador. We can learn from multidimensional measures of poverty to develop more holistic strategies to address many of the humanitarian issues that we face today.
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