The measurement of multidimensional poverty in the indigenous population of Mexico stems from two concerns. The first is a general concern about poverty. It has been established that the prevalence of poverty in the indigenous population – extreme poverty in particular – is consistently greater than in the rest of the population, and that it involves much broader factors than income. The end result is an accumulation of disadvantages that work against equal rights.
What do a survivor of the Bangladeshi war of independence, a leprosy sufferer, and a Colombian demobilised FARC member have in common? The answer is that stigma and discrimination –which are related to the emotional states of shame and humiliation – have played a central role in the poverty of these people, as it shows in the three stories published in the Spanish newspaper El País that we will see below.
The National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) of Colombia launched its Municipal Multidimensional Poverty Measure from Census Sources. This measure consists of five dimensions: educational conditions of the household, conditions of childhood and youth, health, employment and housing conditions, and access to public services.
Kari is a 45-year-old woman who lives in her birthplace village in Bihar, India. She was married to her husband when she was 13, and they have a son and three daughters. The family is Hindu and belongs to the Musahar caste. During certain sea- sons, Kari finds agricultural employment related to the crop cycle, often walking 15 kilometres to work.
South Africa measures poverty using a monetary approach as well as multidimensionally, with the former measure being the official poverty measure.It has been my experience that you can either present complex phenomena such as poverty elegantly with a single composite index or awkwardly with a multiplicity of indices. It is a challenging task to explain the latter to busy policymakers and politicians with the short attention spans of speed-master tweeters. These two positions of simplicity versus complexity are a matter of deep intellectual discourse that spans decades if not centuries.