The InterDependent

By now anyone who has heard about the Millennium Development Goals would know that 2010 is a milestone year. They were adopted in 2000, based on 1990 benchmarks and have a deadline of 2015 to meet the eight ambitious goals designed to make the world a better place, especially for poor people. Now, with just five years to go, comes a study from Oxford University with new ideas about how poverty should be measured.

The rethink will not be good news for some countries, particularly larger developing nations with huge social and economic disparities, where how many dollars a day a family earns does not tell the full story of the life the family leads. Factoring in malnourishment, scant or no education and a hut with a dirt floor raises the numbers of the poor in human terms.

The United Nations Development Program plans to factor the new thinking into the next edition of its Human Development Report to be published this fall.

Reduced to an oversimplified level – this is a very dense, mathematical report – the new study, “Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A New Index for Developing Countries,” breaks down broad-brush countrywide statistics and bores into the life of households to try to measure how a combination of deprivations affects everyone in a family. Unlike various monitoring reports for the Millennium Development Goals, which focus on single aspects of development, and on a national level – in maternal mortality or universal primary education, for example -- the Oxford study looks at a package of indicators in health, education and living standards that taken together “batter a household at the same time,” in the study’s own words.

Has any child died? Has no one in the house completed five years of schooling? With what fuel do you cook? Is the floor made of sand or dung? Is there a toilet? A radio? Such are the kinds of questions asked. Answers are applied to the whole family on the principle that deprivations are shared by all.

“Many MDG reports identify the percentage of countries that are ‘on target’ to meet the MDGs,” the Oxford study says. “Such analyses do not present any information on the actual number of people who are deprived…. Reporting the MDGs entirely in terms of countries deeply underemphasizes poor people in large countries.”

The Oxford survey, drawing on a range of data and directed by Sabina Alkire and Maria Emma Santos, looked at 104 countries with a total of about 5.2 billion people – about 78 percent of the global population. Of those people, 1.7 billion, or 32 percent, were deemed poor by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative researchers, who deliberately did not attach a firm dollar figure to what that means in income terms. But they suggest that if a figure were applied it would fall somewhere between living on $1.25 and $2 a day.

What does it all mean to a layperson? An example: The country that has attracted the most attention as a result of the survey is India (and by extension South Asia). “South Asia is home to nearly twice as many multidimensionally poor people as the next poorest-region, Africa,” the Oxford study found. Fifty-one percent of the world’s poor live in India. Moreover, the pockets of poor there are large and deep. Eight of India’s 28 states have more poor people -- 421 million by the Oxford calculation -- than the poorest 26 countries in Africa combined, at 410 million.

Indian social scientists and activists have seized on these figures to question how a country’s boast of being a global economic giant can explain such statistics. A leading Indian economist, C.P. Chandrasekhar, a left-wing critic of India’s privatization policies, which have created a middle class of several hundred million people but left a huge majority of Indians in poverty, blamed government failures in a commentary in The Hindu newspaper after the new multidimensional poverty measures were publicized. India, which will overtake China as the world’s most populous nation in the next few decades, has more than 1.2 billion people.

“[I] t has been known that once we went beyond pure income measures of poverty and looked at other indicators of deprivation, not only was the incidence of deprivation substantial in terms of indicators varying from literacy to child malnutrition, but the progress in alleviating certain forms of deprivation had slowed during the high growth years,” he wrote. “The problem is not just that India has significantly underperformed when addressing poverty and deprivation over 60-plus years of post-Independence development, but that progress has slowed in precisely those years when the surpluses available to tackle this problem have increased substantially. The problem is not inadequate growth, but one of institutional inadequacy.”

He added a warning: “It is also one of an increasing reluctance of the elite to address those inadequacies and, therefore, of the failure of what is undisputedly one of the most remarkable experiments with parliamentary democracy.”

The message from Oxford, as a summit on the Millennium Development Goals nears in September, is that governments need to pause and look again at their progress, measuring achievements in much broader human development terms. There may be more poor people than anyone imagined. Or more than we care to admit.