Moving beyond poverty

The conventional income-based and consumption-oriented food-basket approaches have lost their economic and sociological credence as a means to measure poverty assessment for three reasons.

The first limitation of conventional approaches to assess poverty is that they are reductive in nature as they leave out the contextual and spatial variances of poverty. The contextual (cultural and social) and spatial (geographical) dimensions of poverty have serious implications for social policy. Conventional approaches of poverty assessment don’t take into account the indigenous structures, informal social-protection mechanisms and unaccounted-for labour with the household economy, which contribute towards domestic wellbeing.

In an urban setting, monetary income can be a discernible measure of household wellbeing like the per day earnings of a member of a family. But in a remote rural area, the informal and kinship-based social-protection structures cannot strictly be understood through income-based approaches. For instance, the measure of $1.90 per day per person as the income threshold of the poverty line can be an acceptable measure to determine the poverty of an urban household.

In a rural setting, however, a person earning the same amount per day with an informal kinship-based system of social protection cannot be equated with a poor person in urban areas. Hence, the measure of per day earnings will always lead to faulty conclusions across cultures and geographies when it comes to determining poverty levels.

The second limitation of conventional approaches to assess poverty is that they rely on narrowly-defined econometric measures of consumption patterns. The food-consumption patterns of an individual or a household cannot be taken as a singular measure to determine household poverty or wellbeing across cultures and geographies. The food-basket approach doesn’t tell us much about the overall poverty status and comparative wellbeing of a food-grower in a rural setting and a food-purchaser in an urban area.

The calorific intakes of a food-growing, low-income farmer can be much better than an urban, non-poor food-buying household. The food basket available to an urban person is considered the economic condition of a person who has the ability to purchase certain food items. Like income-based tools of poverty and prosperity assessment, the food-basket approach alone doesn’t offer adequate data to support the government and social-development agencies to formulate policies for poverty alleviation.

The third weakness of conventional poverty-assessment approaches is that of a conceptual disarray wherein poverty is treated as an absolute idea. In reality, both poverty and prosperity are relative concepts, with varying economic, social, cultural and structural manifestations.

There are serious policy implications when we put the ultra-poor and those affected by transient poverty in the same socioeconomic category for a poverty-alleviation programme. For instance, the ultra-poor also need support to survive with a graduation approach that focuses on long-term income support. A person who is affected by transient poverty needs skills, access to financial instruments, and business-incubation support to graduate out of poverty. Both socio-economic categories cannot be lumped together under the conceptual rubric of ‘absolute poverty’.

The social-development programmes for poverty alleviation must, therefore, be founded on a broad-based conceptual framework, which could reflect the multidimensionality and relative nature of poverty and wellbeing. It requires a large but interconnected, timely and quantifiable dataset, with a minimal risk of erroneous policy outcomes vis-a-vis poverty alleviation. The most important aspect of a well-informed social policy to target poverty is the input in the form of the depth, width and contextual relevance of the database. The more comprehensive and integrated the database, the more efficient, effective and comprehensive the poverty alleviation strategy would be.

This brings us to the importance of an integrated poverty-assessment tool, which could capture the varying dimensions of poverty in its economic and contextual settings. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) introduced by the UNDP is one such assessment tool that strives to capture maximum dimensions of poverty. However, its strength lies more in the scope of its indicators rather than its methodology to capture the essence of the economic, social and geographical dimensions of poverty.

The validity of a database generated through the MPI is largely dependent on the ability, efficiency and willingness of the surveyor rather than the essence of experiential poverty among people. The MPI may not be deemed a participatory poverty-assessment tool or an instrument of poverty-action research, but it is an effective tool that accounts for various factors of deprivations.

The MPI is an all-encompassing dataset that provides a full spectrum of the household-based status of poverty and wellbeing across varying contexts. In terms of volume and the scale of database captures through the MPI, it becomes one of the most representative poverty-assessment tools to support social-policy formulation. What makes it the most reliable database for social-policy formulation is the range that it covers in term of the detailed assessment of an individual’s relative poverty and wellbeing.

The index assesses deprivation across three dimensions and 10 indicators: health (child mortality and nutrition), education (years of schooling and enrollment), and living standards (water, sanitation, electricity and cooking fuel). If someone is deprived in a third or more of the 10 (weighted) indicators, the global index identifies them as ‘MPI poor’ and the extent – or intensity – of their poverty is measured through the extent of deprivation they are experiencing in their daily lives.

The MPI has evolved over the years as the most reliable poverty-assessment tool after the Poverty Scorecard used by a variety of stakeholders, including public-sector institutions, policy think-tanks and development agencies to design poverty-alleviation programmes and interventions. The index has been useful in providing targeted services for the poor through development stakeholders to help address multidimensional poverty, resulting in an improved quality of life. The deployment of assessment methodology, capacity of field surveyors, and monitoring and feedback loops can affect the outcome of the assessment.

In a nutshell, the MPI provides the largest compendium of databases to help build comprehensive and integrated development programmes to address multidimensional poverty in Pakistan. The large set of the MPI’s multi-sectoral indicators is the most reliable and inclusive measure of addressing the knowledge gap of poverty-assessment programmes in the country.

Social-development programmes are not essentially aimed at providing pathways of prosperity on their own. These programmes are primarily designed to provide support to those segments of society who have been adversely affected by the lack of a trickledown effect of economic and social policies.

In Pakistan, all macroeconomic stabilisation initiatives have had an adverse impact on the livelihood, asset base, income and consumption of the poor. The MPI is an important tool in terms of broadening the scope of social development beyond econometric approaches and shifting it towards an integrated socioeconomic-transformation programme.

The writer is a senior socialdevelopment and policy adviser, and a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com

Twitter: @AmirHussain76