The 2021 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)
Recently the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for the year 2021 has been released.
It is issued by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative.
MPI measures poverty by analyzing the various deprivations experienced by people in their daily lives.
The main three dimensions of poverty are as follows – “Health, Education and Standard of living”, and on the basis of these the Multidimensional Poverty Index is determined.
This year the MPI has examined multidimensional poverty in 109 countries. With the available information, individual poverty scenarios based on ethnicity/race/ are presented for 41 countries.
Key Conclusions:
- In 109 countries, 1.3 billion people (21.7%) are multidimensionally poor. Half of these are teenagers under the age of 18.
- About 85% of the multidimensional poor live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The top 3 countries with the highest number of people suffering from multidimensional poverty are India, Nigeria and Pakistan.
- In some cases, disparities in multidimensional poverty across ethnic and racial groups exceed inequalities in geographic sub-national regions.
- Five out of six multidimensional poor people in India belong to tribes or lower castes.
- Around two-thirds of the multidimensional poor (836 million) worldwide live in households where no woman or girl has completed at least six years of schooling.
- 70 countries have shown a statistically significant decline in MPI value over at least one time period. The sharpest change has come in the situation in Sierra Leone, then Togo.
Source – The Hindu
