In Focus: Poverty in the Developing World
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905819891368 |
| Author | Benjamin D. Hennig |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
20 POLITICAL INSIGHT • DECEMBER 2019
In Focus
In 2015, all United Nations member
states adopted a set of 17 Sustainable
Development Goals (SDG). First on the
list was ‘no poverty’.
As the United Nations itself noted, ‘while
the number of people living in extreme
poverty dropped by more than half
between 1990 and 2015, too many are still
struggling for the most basic human needs.’
Yet just as eradicating poverty poses a major
challenge, there are diculties in how we
can accurately identify and quantify people
who live in poverty.
There are many dierent ways to
understand and measure poverty. The rst
target of the SDG poverty strand takes
a rather traditional approach to tackling
poverty in a global context: ‘By 2030,
eradicate extreme poverty for all people
everywhere, currently measured as people
living on less than $1.25 a day.’ Such an
understanding of poverty in economic terms
has been widely used. The SDG’s preceding
Millennium Development Goals already
aimed at halving the proportion of people
who live on incomes below $1.25 between
1990 and 2015, which was achieved in both
absolute and relative terms, mostly due to
signicant progress in Asia and the Pacic
region.
Yet such a global threshold – which is also
described as the ‘international poverty line’ –
is not without criticism. It allows researchers
to draw a global picture of extreme poverty
with relatively little data, but it therefore lacks
the complexity of understanding about the
basic needs someone has in terms of access
to essential resources.
Mindful of this, the SDG contain additional
targets that are aimed at taking these
complexities of poverty into account
and linking this to other goals, such as
vulnerability of populations ‘to climate-
related extreme events and other economic,
social and environmental shocks and
disasters’ (target 1.5). Focusing on the core
aspect of poverty, target 1.2 aims to ‘reduce at
least by half the proportion of men, women
and children of all ages living in poverty
in all its dimensions according to national
denitions.’ This acknowledges that poverty is
multifaceted, while keeping the target open
to political interpretation for the states that
signed up to these goals.
Finding suitable indicators for measuring
such a target therefore, is a complex task.
Doing so at a globally comparable scale is
even more challenging. Eorts have been
made in recent years towards considering
the SDG in global statistics, such as those
compiled by United Nations organisations.
The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index
(MPI) was developed which has a specic
focus on what the authors see as three key
dimensions of poverty: Health, education and
standard of living.
The most recent report compiles data from
101 countries with a total population of 5.7
billion, or 76 per cent of the world total. In
these countries, 1.3 billion people lived in
multidimensional poverty in the reporting
period as shown in the large map, which is
using a population-weighted depiction of the
world to better demonstrate the magnitude
of poverty and how it aects people (as
opposed to mere ‘land’ which is shown in
normal maps). Eighty four point ve per cent
of poor people live in Sub-Saharan Africa and
South Asia, according to this measure. Half of
the population aected by multidimensional
poverty are children under the age of 18.
Ten indicators are used to determine
whether a person lives in a deprived
household of what the MPI calls acute
poverty. These include, in dierent
weightings, nutrition and child mortality
for health; years of schooling and school
attendance for education; and cooking
fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity,
housing and assets for the standard of living.
Deprivation in at least one third of these
indicators then results in someone being
classied as multidimensionally poor.
As shown in the smaller three cartograms,
the three dimensions contribute with quite
varying spatial patterns to the overall MPI
outcomes. Health contributes much more
to poverty in relative terms in countries
with relatively smaller shares of acute poor
populations, such as Mexico or Ukraine.
This suggests that here, health is the key
dimension that still needs tackling. In
contrast, those countries with the highest
share of acute poor populations are
characterised by a more heterogeneous
contribution of each of the three dimensions,
while in general the standard of living is
among the higher contributors.
In South Sudan, where almost 92 per cent
of the population are acute poor, deprivation
in the standard of living contributes 46.5
per cent, deprivation in education 39.6 per
cent and health 14 per cent. In Niger, where
also above 90 per cent of the population
are acute poor, health contributes a lot
more to this outcome with 20.3 per cent in
this dimension, while the standard of living
contributes less than in South Sudan, yet
still accounts for 42.4 per cent. These are
just two examples from the patterns that
Poverty in the
Developing World
Benjamin D. Hennig maps changing understandings of poverty in the
poorest parts of the world.
Political Insight December 2019.indd 20 05/11/2019 10:15
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