Half of world’s 1.3 billion poor are children – UNDP
Published:Friday | July 17, 2020 | 12:23 AMNadine Wilson-Harris/Staff Reporter
Despite efforts to reduce global poverty worldwide, roughly 1.3 billion people across 107 developing countries are still multidimensionally poor, lacking access to proper nutrition, healthcare, education, and a decent standard of living.
This was among the key findings of the 2020 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which was released on Thursday by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHDI) by the University of Oxford and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
A household, and so all its members, is multidimensionally poor if it is deprived in one-third or more of the weighted indicators.
While the data, which was collected prior to COVID-19, is focused on the fact that multidimensional poverty has declined, UNDP administrator Achim Steiner fears that the pandemic will derail the progress made so far.
“At least 270 million people have been lifted out of multidimensional poverty over the course of a decade. COVID-19 has changed everything. With its triple hit on health, education, and income and so many others in people’s lives, it threatens to reverse overall global human development perhaps for the first time since the UNDP started calculating it from the human development index,” he said.
“Let us be clear, there will be more crises, particularly in the face of our ever-more-unstable climate,” Steiner cautioned.
The MPI shows that 67 per cent of multidimensionally poor people are in middle-income countries and that Haiti has the highest percentage of people who are multidimensionally poor and deprived in years of schooling in Latin American and the Caribbean.
Sabina Alkire, director of the OPHDI, noted that of the 1.3 billion people who are multidimensionally poor, 99 per cent carry three or more deprivations and over 80 per cent carry five or more at the same time.
“Half of them are children, two-thirds live in middle income countries, 85 per cent of them wake up in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, 85 per cent live in rural areas,” she shared during a virtual launch of the report.
The report indicates that 65 countries reduced their MPI value significantly in absolute terms. The countries that have managed to do so at a fast rate include Sierra Leone, which managed to do so despite battling the Ebola epidemic. India was able to halve its MPI value while China also came close to halving its value. India reduced poverty among citizens by 270 million people in 10 years while in four years, China’s was slashed by 70 million.
Theadora Swift Koller, senior technical adviser on equity at the World Health Organization, expressed concern that nearly 85 per cent of the world’s multidimensional poor live in rural areas.
“In many countries, rural and poor populations typically experience inequities,” she said, noting that they are most likely to experience maternal mortality, tropical disease, occupational-health issues, and non-communicable diseases as they face challenges in accessing timely health services.