Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty Transcript Key DE: DAVID EDMONDS SA: SABINA ALKIRE DE:This is Social Science Bites with me, David Edmonds. Social Science Bites is a series of interviews with leading social scientists and is made in association with Sage Publishing. Armenia, Bhutan, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and so on-- what do these and many more countries have in common? Well, they’ve all used what’s called the Alkire-Foster Method to create their own multi- dimensional measures of poverty levels. The Alkire-Foster Method was developed at Oxford. One of the two people after whom the measure is named is Sabina Alkire. Sabina Alkire, welcome to Social Science Bites. SA:It’s lovely to be here. Thank you so much. DE:The topic we’re talking about today is measurement of poverty. How has poverty traditionally been measured? SA:Usually, it has been a monetary measure-- either consumption or income. And a person is deemed to be poor if they don’t have enough by some poverty line. Then they’re identified as poor. And the poverty line is either based on some basket of goods or a food that they can buy with it. Or it’s relative to the society that they live in. By the World Bank’s Extreme Income Poverty Measure, a SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. person is poor if they earn less than $1.90 a day. And the aim of the Sustainable Development Goals is to end that form of extreme income poverty. DE:So we’re given a figure. That sounds perfectly sensible. What could be wrong with that? SA:So it’s very important. It must be always used and always considered. Because income gives a person a freedom. Income reflects a constraint upon them if they don’t have enough of it. So I’m not at all against income poverty measures or consumption poverty measures. But it doesn’t tell the whole story. And a person is also poor if they are malnourished, and their house is decaying, and they don’t have a job, and they’re not educated, or their children is not attending school, or they’re victims of violence. And so when you talk with poor people about what poverty is, they give a much more three-dimensional account. And the measures of poverty that capture those other forms are not perfectly correlated with the monetary poverty measure. DE:I understand most of those dimensions that you mentioned. Let me just pick up on one of them. You said victims of violence. People can be victims of violence in extremely wealthy families commonly. And that doesn’t make them poor. SA:That’s true. But when there’s a multiplicity of things happening at the same time and going wrong, people describe it as poverty. To give an example, in El Salvador, they carried out a two-year participatory study with poor people in communities on what poverty was. And one of the features that this participatory study introduced that the previous people thinking about poverty in El Salvador did not include was violence. And they felt that, in their neighborhoods, the level of violence was so high that after a certain time in the afternoon they couldn’t go out safely. It inhibited their work. And they were more affected than other groups of the population. And so it is a part of the poverty, although it’s not only affecting them. But similarly, a person could be malnourished for reasons that do not have Page 2 of 11 Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. to do with poverty-- that either have to do with health or recovery from an illness. They could also have lost a child. And it’s not from poverty, it’s from a tragedy. So there are many features of poverty, one by one that may not actually be related to a material lack. But when you bring them together, they usually are. DE:And that’s why you came up with a new way of measuring poverty, which is called-- let me get this right-- the global Multidimensional Poverty Index, or the MPI, which is a basket of criteria. SA:Yes. The global MPI is a measure of poverty. But before that, we created, with James Foster, who is a well-known architect of income poverty measures as well, we created a general purpose methodology for looking at poverty’s many forms and dimensions. And this was drawing on the work of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in economics, who recognized that poor people’s lives are battered and diminished in many and various ways, drawing on voices of the poor and other deeply contextual participatory studies. And a large range of issues and movements that really portray poverty is much broader than income-- including it, but also including these other types of deprivations. So the methodology can be used in different contexts. But it basically looks at the different dimensions of poverty, indicators of poverty that a person is experiencing together, and comes up with a measure. And the global MPI implements that for a very acute definition of poverty for over 100 developing countries. DE:Explain to me what those criteria are. So they would be things like sanitation, housing, as well as income? SA:So the global MPI does not include income. It can’t, because the surveys we draw on don’t have income in there. But it’s health, like malnutrition or if a child has died, very sadly. It’s education if nobody in the household has completed five years of schooling, if a child is not attending school. And then, like you said, there are a number of household indicators of living standard, like sanitation and Page 3 of 11 Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. water and electricity and flooring, cooking fuel. And then if you own some small assets, like a radio or television, telephone, motorcycle, bicycle. In each of those 10 indicators in three dimensions, a person can be either deprived or not deprived. And so you sort of get a little profile of their deprivations. And the dimensions are equally weighted. And then if people as a total are deprived in more than one third of these dimensions at the same time, we identify them as poor. If they’re 20% or more, they’re vulnerable to poverty. If they’re 50% or more, then they’re severely poor. But we can see for each person, their individual deprivation score-- the percentage of deprivations they’re deprived in at the same time. And more is worse. And that’s the basis of a multidimensional measure. So you’re first looking at each life across the different realms or dimensions of their poverty and creating a score that reflects those and then combining it for a population. DE:And on your criteria, do you have a number for how many are defined as poor around the world? SA:Yes. In 2017 across the 103 developing countries, 1.45 billion are multidimensionally poor. And 706 million are destitute. DE:It does mean that your criteria have to be consistent year in, year out. Because you could radically alter the numbers by just adjusting the criteria. SA:Yes. So we were honored to develop the global MPI with the UNDP-- United Nations Development Programme-- Human Development Report Office in 2010 in the 20-year anniversary of the Human Development Index. And since 2010, we have kept on the methodology unchanged. Of course, we’ve added more countries and more surveys. And also, very sadly, population has grown. And so even though the level of poverty has come down, the number of poor people have not come down as quickly because of the rapid population growth in many countries. Page 4 of 11 Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty SAGE SAGE Research Methods Podcasts 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. DE:Tell me what the methodology is for accumulating that data. Where do you get your stats from? SA:So we use surveys that are in the public domain. For over 50 countries, we use demographic and health surveys that have traditionally been funded by United States Agency for International Development. For over 30 countries, we use the multiple indicator cluster surveys funded by UNICEF. We use some PAPFAM surveys in the Arab region, and then a number of national surveys for Brazil and China and Mexico, Argentina, Jamaica, South Africa-- particular surveys for those countries. DE:Are there some countries where the data is less reliable than in others? SA:So the surveys that we use, we do have a very key eye on data quality. And we talk with data providers. And insofar as we can, all the surveys that we use are reliable for the purposes for which we use them. And we document any disturbances or any differences in our methodological documents. So we try to be very transparent. But what is shocking to a lot of people is that these are low- income countries-- least developed countries. But actually, thanks not to our work, but the work of Demographic and Health Survey and Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, we have good data for many countries. DE:If you go to a shantytown in Mumbai or in Caracas in Venezuela, you can see poverty.