Editorial – Dimensions 16

In 2015, the United Nations Data Revolution Group called for “Better data and statistics to help governments track progress and make evidence-based decisions” with the aim of “fully integrating statistics into decision making”. Yet the data revolution has not affected all data sources and countries equally.

Recent reports highlight the widening gap in the availability of multidimensional poverty data, with the poorest countries having no updated household surveys in over 10 years.

Despite advancements over the last decade, issues with frequency, domain coverage, population coverage, data accessibility, and financing of household surveys remain in many countries. Lack of regularly updated data limits the update of official multidimensional poverty measures, used to monitor progress on Indicator 1.2.2 under Goal 1 of Agenda 2030.

Following in the footsteps of OPHI’s earlier work on the Missing Dimensions of Poverty, this Special Issue presents highlights of the work from the Expert Workshop on ‘Improving the Collection and Availability of Multidimensional Poverty and Wellbeing Data’ organised by OPHI in collaboration with the Colombian National Statistical Office (DANE) and United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report Office.

Bringing together voices from data providers, international agencies, academia and subject experts, the Special Issue presents insights on nine dimensions of human development, including topics like environmental issues, voice and agency, and social connectedness.

Each of the articles discusses the importance of the topic in multidimensional poverty measurement and suggests some recommendations of indicators or questions that could be incorporated in national or cross-national household surveys to improve the quality of multidimensional poverty data and expand its framework to reflect conditions in contexts of higher human development.

Next, wider collaboration is needed to improve these suggestions and pilot some of the proposed questions in national or cross-national household surveys. The aim is to break the poverty data bottleneck and encourage countries and donor agencies to support regular updates of multi-topic surveys that generate valuable policy-relevant information on lived experiences of poverty.

We invite you to read this Special Issue of Dimensions and join OPHI’s efforts to improve the availability of multidimensional poverty – a crucial indicator of progress on eradicating poverty in all its forms everywhere.

 

 

This article was published in Dimensions 16