GSS to launch Ghana Multidimensional Poverty Report

The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has said it will be launching the Ghana Multidimensional Poverty Report on Wednesday 29th July 2020.

The report was prepared in collaboration with UNDP (Ghana) and GIZ with technical support from the Oxford Poverty Human Development initiative (OPHI).

Prior to the launch, the GSS is organizing a one-day training program for media practitioners and other stakeholders on the concepts and methodology of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) to enhance the understanding and interpretation of the MPI.

The training is scheduled to take place on Friday 29th July and it is going to be virtual.

Why multidimensional poverty?

While poverty has been measured in terms of monetary deprivations in the past, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), agreed to in 2015 by the Member States of the United Nations, emphasize the need to consider poverty a multidimensional issue in order to measure and tackle it.

Specifically, the first objective for 2030 is to “reduce by half the number of men, women, and children living in a situation of poverty in all of its dimensions and all of its forms”. This declaration addresses the need to complement traditional measures of poverty with a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which looks at poverty as a complex issue that extends beyond monetary deprivations.

The Multidimensional Poverty Index as a tool for government

Heeding the international call to action, the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) Ghana represents a step toward a more comprehensive view at what lies at the core of those deprivations, the GSS said in a statement.

“It is intended to complement, not replace, our traditional metrics of monetary poverty. The main objective of the MPI-Ghana is to gather information in order to have better public policies aimed at reducing poverty. The MPI-Ghana will show us the different kinds of deprivations that affect our citizens while providing a perspective on how these deprivations affect the ways that poverty is manifested.

“The Alkire-Foster Method counts the overlapping or simultaneous deprivations that a person or family experiences in different indicators of poverty, identifying the components of poverty in different groups, to propose policies and Interventions that reduce these deprivations. Our MPI uses the Alkire-Foster Method, developed by Oxford University. The MPI-Ghana has twelve indicators grouped in three dimensions: (Education, Health and Living Standards dimensions). Households with deprivations in 33% or more indicators are identified as poor by the MPI.

“The source of information to build the National MPI is the (Ghana Living Standards Survey 2017 and Ghana Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey 2001-2018). The MPI-Ghana seeks to better understand the needs of Ghanaian families and to avoid the fragmentation of government strategies. It identifies and measures the incidence and intensity of poverty, and it is used as a tool to complement existing measures in Ghana. The goal is to use the MPI information to design more effective public policies that lead to poverty reduction in all its dimensions.

“The deprivations considered by MPI-Ghana may affect households and individuals to varying intensity, depending on factors such as their region, gender, ethnicity.”