According to the Global Multidimensional Index Poverty Index (MPI) 2024: Poverty amid Conflict, 1.1 billion people(18.3%) out of 6.1 billion people across 112 countries live in acute multidimensional poverty and staggering 455 million (40%) of the world’s poor live in countries experiencing war, fragility and/ or low peacefulness, which is hindering and even reversing hard-won progress to reduce poverty.
- As per the report, India with 234 million people has the largest number of people living in poverty, followed by Pakistan (93 million), Ethiopia (86 million), Nigeria (74 million) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (66 million).
- Together, all these 5 countries accounted for nearly half (48.1%) of the 1.1 billion poor people across the world.
2024 Global MPI:
i.It was jointly released by the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) based at the University of Oxford on 17th October 2024, which is observed annually as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
ii.The global MPI is measured over a 10-year period (2012-23) to create a comparable index of global levels and trends.
- The MPI is measured across different non-income-based dimensions, such as: Health, Education and Living Standards.
- The MPI was created using the multidimensional measurement method of Alkire and Foster (AF).
iii.The latest edition of the report has used the most recent comparable data available for 112 countries, including 21 Low Income Countries (LICs), 47 Middle Income Countries (MICs), 40 Upper Middle-Income Countries (UMICs) and 4 High-Income Countries (HICs).
- These countries are home to 6.3 billion people, about 92% of the population in developing regions, and are disaggregated for 1,359 sub-national regions as well as by age group, rural-urban area and gender of the household head.
ivThe report assessed the multidimensional poverty of the countries based on indicators such as a lack of adequate housing, sanitation, electricity, cooking fuel, nutrition and school attendance.
Highlights:
i.According to the report, over half of the 1.1 billion poor people i.e. 584 million, are children under the age of 18. Globally, approximately 28% of children live in poverty, compared with 13.5% of adults.
ii.553 million people, representingnearly 50% of the poor people in the world, live in Sub-Saharan Africa region, followed by South Asia (402 million). Together both these regions accounted for 83.2% of poor people.
- The MPI value is highest in Sub- Saharan Africa (0.254), where the indicators contributing most to poverty are years of schooling, school attendance and nutrition.
iii.The report showed that 83.7% of poor people live in rural areas. It further revealed that overall, 28% of the global rural population are poor, compared with 6.6% of the global urban population.
iv.The report showed that of 86 countries with harmonized data, 76 countries have significantly reduced poverty according to the MPI value in at least one time period.
v.The report revealed that of the 17 countries with trend data that end in 2021-22 or later, 7 spanning at least part of the COVID-19 pandemic, only 9 countries such as: Benin, Cambodia, Comoros, the Kingdom of Eswatini, Kenya, Mozambique, the Philippines, the United Republic of Tanzania, and Trinidad and Tobago, witnessed significant reductions in both MPI value and incidence of poverty.
Key Findings Based on MPI’s Indicators:
i.The report underscored that significant proportions of the 1.1 billion people lack adequate sanitation (828 million), housing (886 million) and cooking fuel (998 million).
ii.The report found that 637 million poor people are deprived in nutrition, of which a significant proportion of poor people who are deprived in nutrition live in South Asia (272 million) and Sub-Saharan Africa (256 million) region.
iii.As per the report, 579 million poor people lack electricity and 590 million people live in a household where no one has completed 6 years of schooling.
iv.513 million poor people do not have an improved source of drinking water and 484 million poor people live in households where one or more children are out of school.
Countries at conflict are more prone to multidimensional poverty:
i.The report highlighted that countries at war have higher deprivations compared with non-conflict affected countries across all 10 indicators of multidimensional poverty, underscoring the devastating impact on the world’s most vulnerable populations.
ii.As per the report, the child mortality rate amongst poor people in countries at war is 8%, which is nearly 8 times higher than amongst poor people in non-conflict affected countries (1.1%).
iii.The report found that over one in four poor people (26.9%) in countries at war lack access to electricity compared to over one in twenty (5.6%) in stable regions.
iv.While, access to education is 4 times worse (17.7% against 4.4%) for children from poor families.
v.Around 21% of poorer people are less likely to receive suitable nutrition compared to 7.2% poorer people living in stable regions.
vi.The report has provided in-depth case study on Afghanistan, where additional 5.3 million people fell into multidimensional poverty between 2015-16 and 2022-23. It further mentioned that nearly 2/3rd of the population (64.9%) was living in poverty between 2022 and 2023.
