WHAT IS POVERTY ???
World Bank definition :” social phenominon in which a section of society is unable to fullfill their basic needs…”
People can be said to be in poverty when they are deprived of income and other resources needed to obtain the conditions of life—the diets, material goods, amenities, standards and services that enable them to play the roles, meet the obligations and participate in the relationships and customs of their society.
Three alternative conceptions of poverty have evolved as a basis for international and comparative work.
They depend principally on the ideas of subsistence, basic needs and relative deprivation.
TYPES OF POVERTY
1.Absolute poverty
2.Relative poverty
World bank calculate poverty on terms of personal income of $1.9 per day…
”’MULTIDIMENTIONAL POVERY INDEX (MPI)
2018 MPI: dimensions, indicators, deprivation cutoffs, and weights
The MPI looks beyond income to understand how people experience poverty in multiple and simultaneous ways.
It identifies how people are being left behind across three key dimensions: health, education and standard of living, comprising 10 indicators.
People who experience deprivation in at least one third of these weighted indicators fall into the category of multidimensionally poor.
| Dimensions of Poverty | Indicator | Deprived if living in the household where… | Weight |
| Health | Nutrition | An adult under 70 years of age or a child is undernourished. | 1/6 |
| Child mortality | Any child has died in the family in the five-year period preceding the survey. | 1/6 | |
| Education | Years of schooling | No household member aged 10 years or older has completed six years of schooling. | 1/6 |
| School attendance | Any school-aged child is not attending school up to the age at which he/she would complete class 8. | 1/6 | |
| Standard of living | Cooking Fuel | The household cooks with dung, wood, charcoal or coal. | 1/18 |
| Sanitation | The household’s sanitation facility is not improved (according to SDG guidelines) or it is improved but shared with other households. | 1/18 | |
| Drinking Water | The household does not have access to improved drinking water (according to SDG guidelines) or safe drinking water is at least a 30-minute walk from home, round trip. | 1/18 | |
| Electricity | The household has no electricity. | 1/18 | |
| Housing | Housing materials for at least one of roof, walls and floor are inadequate: the floor is of natural materials and/or the roof and/or walls are of natural or rudimentary materials. | 1/18 | |
| Assets | The household does not own more than one of these assets: radio, TV, telephone, computer, animal cart, bicycle, motorbike or refrigerator, and does not own a car or truck. | 1/18 |
Resource share amoung Families and Gender gap in poverty rates
Women and children tend to have disproportionately less access to resources and basic services, especially in the poorest countries. Women in poorer countries often withdraw from the labour force and lose their earning potential when they reach reproductive age.
The gender gap in poverty rates is largest during the reproductive years when care and domestic responsibilities, which are socially assigned to women, overlap and conflict with productive activities. Thistension is often most pronounced among the poorest countries and the poorest groups in society.
For example, the average sex difference in poverty for 20–34-year-olds in Sub-Saharan Africa is 7 percentage points, compared to a global average of 2 percentage points and virtually zero in Europe and Central Asia.
Another way to go beyond the household to the individual level is to look at how food is shared within families. In Bangladesh, for example, household survey data reveal that household heads—mostly men—have much smaller calorie shortfalls than individuals who are not household heads. Such differences are invisible in standard measures of poverty.
Country Specific analysis
Back in 1990, 36 percent of the world’s people lived in poverty, defined by the IPL as an income of less than US$1.90 a day in 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP).
By 2015, that share had plunged to 10 percent.
The number of people living in extreme poverty stood at 736 million in 2015, down from nearly 2 billion in 1990
Sub-Saharan Africa now accounts for most of the world’s poor, and—unlike most of the rest of the world—the total number of poor there is increasing.
Stronger economic growth and renewed efforts to resolve violent conflicts will be crucial to speed up the rate of poverty reduction in Africa and elsewhere.
Expanded, “multidimensional” view reveals a world in which poverty is a much broader, more entrenched problem, underlining the importance of investing more in human capital.
At the global level, the share of poor according to a multidimensional definition that includes consumption, education, and access to basic infrastructure is approximately 50 percent higher than when relying solely on monetary poverty.
To build a true picture of poverty as experiencedby individuals, we also need to go beyond the traditional household level to consider how resources are shared among families.
Nearly half the world (46 percent) lives on less than US$5.50 per day, a standard that defines poverty in a typical upper-middleincome country . A quarter of the world lives on less than US$3.20 per day.
As we seek a broader understanding of poverty, it is important to recognize that what constitutes a basic need can vary depending on a country’s level of consumption or income. In a poorer country, for example, participating in the job market may require only clothing and food, whereas someone in a richer society may also need internet access, a vehicle, and a cell phone. The cost of performing thesame function may differ across countries depending on their overall level of income.
To assess this type of poverty, the World Bank is introducing the societal poverty line(SPL) as a complement to its existing lines.The SPL is a combination of the absolute IPLand a poverty line that is relative to the median income level of each country.
Shared Prosperity
“Income or consumption growth among the bottom 40 percent of the distribution..”
Whereas societal poverty is based on a poverty line that is in part relative to the median consumption levels across countries, the shared prosperity measure monitored by the World Bank is similarly relative to how individuals are doing in each and every country. By assessing how the bottom 40 aredoing in each economy, the World Bank’s measure of shared prosperity is relevant to countries of all income levels. Overall,the news on shared prosperity is positive, with almost 80 percent of the countries for which data are available showing growth in the bottom 40’s income
Shared prosperity and societal poverty capture different aspects of how the relatively less well-off are doing in each country.
The multidimensional approach highlights how the ways deprivations interact varywidely from country to country. the multidimensional approach can be extended to include, in addition toeducation and access to basic infrastructure services, two other dimensions: health and nutrition, and security from crime and natural disaster….