In 2022, as I shared here, the world had over 1 billion people living in multidimensional poverty. As 2030 – the deadline for eliminating all forms of poverty – draws closer, how close are we to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 1? Having read the 2023 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report, found here, I learnt that:

2023, the world still has over 1 billion people living in multidimensional poverty and, as was the case in 2022, the majority of them: 

• are in Sub-Saharan Africa (534 million), followed by South Asia (389 million);
• live in rural areas (about 84%), but urban poverty is worsening.   
• are children (566 million), which confirms what I shared here about child poverty.

COVID-19 worsened global poverty, as reported here and here, for example, but the exact extent of its impact remains unclear. The 2023 Global MPI report hardly sheds light on the extent and nature of global poverty after the pandemic. As the report asserts, post-pandemic poverty data for virtually 110 countries covered by the Global MPI is not available. This implies that we do not know how much poverty there actually is in the world in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. I support the report’s call, therefore, for countries to collect data on multidimensional poverty in the period after the pandemic.

Lack of access to [clean] cooking fuel is the most prevalent form of poverty worldwide. As the 2023 Global MPI report reveals, of the 1.1 billion people living in multidimensional poverty, an alarming 991 million lack access to [clean] cooking fuel (you can learn more about cooking poverty from a post I shared here). The situation is particularly dire in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

The monetary poverty measure distorts the true extent and nature of poverty existing in a country or globally. Poverty is, as we shared in a scholarly article here, multidimensional, which means that “human lives are battered in multiple ways …” to quote the 2023 Global MPI report. As I argued here, there is no perfect poverty measure, but an effective one should be as ‘least imperfect’ as possible; it should acknowledge the multidimensionality of poverty, among other indicators. The monetary poverty measure falls significantly short of this. Hence, it does not provide an accurate picture of the extent and nature of poverty in a society. With the monetary poverty measure, the world has less than a billion poor people ( as reported here, for example), yet, as shared in the 2023 Global MPI report or by the UNDP here, poor people number over a billion. Where the nature of poverty is concerned, moreover, the monetary poverty measure does not sufficiently capture other forms of poverty, and the World Bank agrees with this here. Thus, one is likely to overlook important forms of poverty, such as lack of access to clean cooking. Although the Global MPI serves to complement monetary poverty measures, how many countries have actually embraced it and developed a National Multidimensional Poverty Index? Only a  handful. Unless this changes, we will keep underestimating the level and nature of poverty nationally or globally and have false optimism. 

A world without poverty is still possible: Despite the unrelenting pervasiveness of poverty worldwide (owing primarily to factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, war in Ukraine, conflicts (e.g. in Sudan), civil unrest, ineffective poverty policies and population growth), a significant number of countries are on course towards poverty eradication. According to the 2023 Global MPI report, 25 countries halved the multidimensionally poor population within 15 years. It is encouraging that Cambodia, for example, reduced by half the number of multidimensionally poor people within 7.5 years, including the pandemic years(2014 – 2021/2022). Significant poverty reduction was also registered in African countries like Nigeria and Lesotho. However, more still needs to be done, as blogged here and here. To this end, we should create, as Bill Gates stressed here or here,  another wave of poverty reduction, which is our next step towards a world with zero poverty!

These are the key takeaways I gained from the 2023 Global MPI Report. I commend the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative of the University of Oxford and the UNDP for their annual efforts to provide a better picture of global poverty.