The Sri Lankan government has boldly declared 2017 as the ‘Year of poverty alleviation’. Reactions to this declaration have been mixed, with some applauding and remaining cautiously optimistic about the President’s promise, and others expressing a degree of skepticism, towards any actual follow through on such lofty rhetoric. After all, many governments around the world [...]

The Sunday Times Sri Lanka

Proceed with caution in measuring Lanka’s poor

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The Sri Lankan government has boldly declared 2017 as the ‘Year of poverty alleviation’. Reactions to this declaration have been mixed, with some applauding and remaining cautiously optimistic about the President’s promise, and others expressing a degree of skepticism, towards any actual follow through on such lofty rhetoric. After all, many governments around the world have, and continue to make similar grand proclamations, akin to lofty and cynical electoral promises.

If the declaration made by the President, is to be put into action, there is a need for all those who are working on this subject to come up with targets that are specific, realistic and centered on the welfare and interests of those who are in the margins of society.

A useful place to start would be by thinking about who is poor and how we measure poverty in the first place. The manner in which we proceed in measuring poverty, will have an enormous impact on how we come to understand it, analyse it and how we can create policies to influence it. Traditionally, poverty measurement has taken a unidimensional approach, by favouring money-metric indicators such as income, and household expenditure, to determine who remains poor.

The paucity of such unidimensional frameworks is increasingly coming to light, and policy makers and development practitioners have begun to think of new ways to frame the concept of poverty. The World Bank, in one of its global reports on poverty, describes it as a “pronounced deprivation in well-being”, and something which is multidimensional in nature. What this means is that usually, poverty does not mean the lack of one thing, but a series of inter-locking factors that make-up the experience of a person considered to be poor.

In Sri Lanka, according to unidimensional poverty measurements used by government bodies, such as the Department of Census and Statistics using HIES (Household Income and Expenditure Surveys), progress has been made in reducing the absolute numbers. However, according to these metrics, there still remains a considerable percentage of the population who are considered, ‘near-poor’- people who are living marginally above the poverty line.

Furthermore, any perceived successes of poverty reduction would become instantly hollow, if the income measurement figures were to be raised. This would result in a large majority of the segment of the ‘near- poor’ immediately falling under the poverty line. According to an estimate made by the Institute for Policy Studies in Sri Lanka, a 10 per cent increase in the poverty line, would result in the addition of more than 800,000 people to the number living under the poverty line. The near-poor are also much more vulnerable than the rest of the population, in that they often are unable to cope with sudden internal and external shocks, such as the death of a family, a hike in commodity prices and natural disasters, and therefore, much more likely to succumb to a sudden and precipitous fall to levels of extreme poverty.

To understand why some segments of the population continue to stagnate at the cusp of falling behind the poverty line, it would be useful to look at the multitude of ways in which the poor are subjective to different vulnerabilities and deprivations. For this purpose, the use of Multidimensional Poverty tools and assessments can be helpful when identifying these often hidden dimensions. The Multidimensional Poverty Index, goes beyond measuring income poverty, and looks at a number of deprivations that affect a household at the same time. The dimensions usually fall under the categories of health, education and living standards. The dimensions are subsequently calculated on a list of 10 indicators, and households are considered multidimensionally poor, if they do not positively account for a third of those 10 indicators. This approach can help policy makers target resources, and formulate policies more effectively and reduce the regional variations in poverty, by identifying more accurately the bottlenecks and challenges experienced in certain geographical areas amongst certain groups.

While there is a need to talk about good governance, efficient management of programmes and bureaucracy, there is a dire need to pay closer attention to the actual needs of the poor and place programmes which uphold and protect their rights. Governments, in the name of eradicating poverty, can ill afford to embark on programmes and projects – poorly thought-out large infrastructure, such as dams or highways, and industrial projects – that create further displacement, and loss of livelihoods and which in turn create deprivations among a new group of people.

Ultimately, tools such as multi-dimensional poverty indexes can get us closer to understanding the underlying problems of the poor and marginalised, but if corresponding people-centered, ecologically sound solutions are not thought of, declarations and measurement tools no matter how comprehensive and progressive, will remain moot.

(WALK the LINE is a monthly
column for the Development Page of the Business Times contributed by CEPA, an independent, Sri Lankan think-tank promoting a better
understanding of poverty related development issues. CEPA can be
contacted by visiting the website www.cepa.lk or via info@cepa.lk) 

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