How can deprivation be compared across continents and cultures? Dr Scott Wisor explains.
What does it mean for a person to be poor? Is it possible for people to be living at different levels of deprivation within the same household? How can levels of deprivation be compared across diverse social and economic contexts? Globally, are women poorer than men? If so, in what sense of poverty is this true?
These questions led a group of academics (from philosophy, economics, gender studies, and development studies) and development practitioners (from international and local development and women’s rights organisations) to develop a new, gendersensitive measure of deprivation that can be used for allocating scarce development resources and tracking the success (or failure) of anti-poverty policies.
Most national and international poverty lines use a monetary measure of poverty. Thinking of poverty as a lack of income or consumption is initially attractive. It is certainly true that most people would be better off if they had more income. But there are some things money can’t buy – such as physical security or a clean environment – and different people face very different conversion factors for turning income into actual achievements. Further problems arise in making international comparisons about the purchasing power of different currencies.
The shortcomings of monetary poverty lines have led researchers to focus on multidimensional measures of poverty. The most common of these is the Multidimensional Poverty Index. It tracks deprivations in standards of living, health, and education. While this is an improvement, it is based on existing data, so does not capture information about other important dimensions in which deprivation can occur.
Our team undertook to design a measure of deprivation that was based on the views and priorities of men and women living in deprivation. We undertook two phases of both qualitative and quantitative research in 18 sites across Angola, Indonesia, Fiji, Mozambique, Malawi, and the Philippines. Men and women from a wide variety of social locations told us how they conceive of poverty and related hardships, and which areas of life are most important for tracking whether a person is living in poverty or not.
Based on this input, we developed the new Individual Deprivation Measure (IDM). The IDM tracks deprivation in 15 areas of life: food, water, shelter, health, education, sanitation, energy, personal relationships, freedom from violence, clothing, timeburden, family planning, environment, voice, and respect at work. Within each dimension, a person can receive anywhere from a score of one (the lowest possible achievement) to a score of five (across a minimal sufficiency threshold). This allows for an exploration of the degrees of deprivation that people face.
Once a person is evaluated in all 15 dimensions, his or her score is then aggregated intra-personally. This aggregation allows for a composite picture of the level of deprivation that a person faces. Individuals are then categorised, based on their composite deprivation score, as either not deprived, somewhat deprived, deprived, very deprived, or extremely deprived. Whereas traditional binary poverty lines have allowed for policy makers to focus merely on improving the lot of those nearest to the poverty line, these categories allow policy makers to focus their anti-poverty resources on the worst-off members of society.
To test the IDM, we conducted a nationally representative survey in the Philippines. This produced very striking findings. While the national monetary poverty line shows 20.9 per cent of Filipinos are poor, the IDM reveals that 48 per cent of Filipinos are extremely deprived, very deprived, or deprived. Interestingly, the survey did not show that women are more deprived than men in the Phillipines, contra common assertions of the feminisation of poverty.
Further work is needed. The selection of dimensions and indicators for measuring multidimensional deprivation must be refined. And the IDM must be extended to track childhood specific deprivations. In the coming years, we hope to support the further spread and development of the IDM in additional countries. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade will support a survey to measure the IDM in Fiji, and NGOs in Israel have used a modified version of the IDM to challenge official poverty statistics.
One might think that all of this is a waste of time. What really matters is not getting an accurate picture of poverty, but eradicating it. This might be true. But what gets measured is what counts. If we cannot have a clear picture of individual deprivation, we cannot determine which projects, policies, and institutional designs are most effective in reducing global poverty. And if we use narrow or misleading measures of poverty, we might mistakenly identify the impact of these policies. Fortunately, the world seems to be waking up to the importance of multidimensional measures of poverty, and researchers are providing new and better tools to guide governments and international organisations.
Dr Scott Wisor is Lecturer and Deputy Director of the University’s Centre for the Study of Global Ethics.