MULTIDIMENSIONAL POVERTY INDEX (MPI) 2020

Q. Why is this in news? 

A. 2020 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index was released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). 

Q. What is Global MPI?

• MPI is the product of the incidence of poverty (proportion of poor people)
  and the intensity of poverty (average deprivation score of poor people) and is therefore sensitive to changes in both components. 
• The MPI ranges from 0 to 1 and higher values imply higher poverty. 
• It examines each person’s deprivations across 10 indicators in three equally weighted dimensions — health, education and standard of living (see infographic) and identify both who is poor and how they are poor. 
• In the global MPI, people are counted as multidimensionally poor if they are deprived in one- third or more of 10 indicators.
  o Each indicator is equally weighted within its  dimension, so the health and education indicators are weighted 1/6 each. 
• MPI – with its information on both the level and composition of poverty – provides the data needed to pinpoint where and how poverty manifests itself. 

Q. What are Key highlights of MPI 2020?

• The 2020 update of the global MPI covers 107 countries and 5.9 billion people in developing regions.
  Across 107 developing countries,1.3 billion people (22%) live in multidimensional poverty. 
• Half of multidimensionally poor people (644 million) are children under age 18. One in three children is poor compared with one in six adults. 
• 107 million multidimensionally poor people are age 60 or older— a particularly importantly figure during the COVID-19 pandemic. 
• About 84.3% of multidimensionally poor people live in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. 
• In every developing region the proportion of people who are multidimensionally poor is higher in rural areas than in urban areas.
• 84.2 percent of multidimensionally poor people live in rural areas, where they are more vulnerable to environmental shocks 
• Largest reduction in multidimensional poverty was in India, where approximately 273 million people moved out of multidimensional poverty between 2005/2006 2015/2016.India also halved it MPI value in this period. 

However, 37.7 crore people lived under multidimensional poverty as of 2018.

Q. What is Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI)?

• It is an economic research centre within the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. 
• OPHI aims to build and advance a more systematic methodological and economic framework for reducing multidimensional poverty, grounded in people’s experiences and values. 
• OPHI works towards this by: broadening poverty measurement, improving data on poverty, building capacity and impacting policy 
• OPHI’s work is grounded in Amartya Sen’s capability approach and it works to implement this approach by creating real tools that inform policies to reduce poverty. 

Q. How is MPI better than other models?

• Multidimensional approach: MPI takes advantage of the availability of multipurpose household surveys which allows data on different dimensions to be drawn from the same survey. It identifies the people who experience overlapping deprivations.
        o MPI replaced the Human Poverty Index (HPI) which was in use from 1997-2009.
• Better Comparison: MPI can show the composition of multidimensional poverty across different regions, ethnic groups or any other population sub-group, with useful implications for policy. 
• HPI could not identify which specific individuals, households or larger groups of people were poor.
• Complement to income-based poverty measures: Income poverty data come from different surveys, and these surveys often do not have information on health,nutrition etc.