When you see or listen to people who are very poor, poverty is easy to identify. Someone telling you that he and his family lie on the floor in their small shack all day and all night because they have no food and not moving conserves energy, or a woman talking about how desperate she is to have access to a grain mill close at hand so that her daughter doesn’t have to walk for 5 hours each Monday carrying the families main food source to the nearest mill and so misses a fifth of her schooling.
But sometimes poverty is more difficult to see or understand.
I have just started to read the Oxford University and UNDP report the Multidimensional Poverty Index. http://www.ophi.org.uk
This uses three dimensions of poverty and 10 indicators to gauge how poor countries are. The three dimensions are health, education and living standards and the 10 indicators are nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, cooking fuel, sanitation, water electricity, floor and assets. Not too sure about floor – it may mean housing or be a typo – but the others all make sense.
One of the things that struck me but maybe didn’t surprise is that using this measure most poor people now live in middle income countries for example India.
This is true to Practical Action’s experience for example in Peru where there has been strong economic growth but even so major sections of the population continue to live in extreme poverty.
As some of you may know we have started to talk about technology justice – the right of people to access the technology they need for a decent standard of life. The justice part of this aligns well with equity. How can it be right for some people to have so much when others have so little?
The MPI is helpful in setting out what we mean as a world by poverty and conversely what we should aim to deliver to everyone. The question however that remains is how.
I hope and believe that’s where Practical Action comes in.
