Government officials support multidimensional poverty at high-level meeting

Between 7-8 July 2014,  80 senior representatives from over 30 governments and international institutions gathered in Berlin, Germany for a high-level meeting of the Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network.

During the meeting, the network and its participants endorsed Multidimensional Poverty Indices (MPIs) as a powerful policy tool for enhanced poverty reduction at the regional, national and subnational level, with the ability to illuminate the state and progress of marginalised groups. They also endorsed multidimensional poverty as an overall goal of the new Sustainable Development Goals and proposed the establishment of a new MPI 2015+ measure of extreme poverty in the post-2015 development context, as captured in the meeting Communiqué.

The meeting brought together the Prime Minister of St Lucia, Dr Kenny Anthony, Vice Presidents from the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, and Ministers and Deputy Ministers from nearly 20 other governments, including Bhutan, Brazil, China, Colombia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa, and Vietnam (videos and slides from presentations given during the meeting are available).

“Events such as these are critical at nurturing support for this globally important initiative. They help us at the top to get new perspectives of what is going on in much greater clarity, and I wish the MPPN well as it continues to “lens in” on the status of poverty around the world” ~ Hon Dr Kenny Anthony, Prime Minister of Saint Lucia keynote speech.

Senior representatives from international institutions such as OECD, UNDP,  Organization of American States (OAS) and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) were also present at the event, which was hosted by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

Resources available online include:

• Videos and slides
• Photos
  
• Communiqué showing the way forward for the network over the coming year
• Agenda and list of participants showing the diversity and range of experiences being shared

The event provided a forum for senior delegates to share conceptual, methodological and practical information on the implementation of multidimensional poverty measures in their respective countries, along with how such innovative measures can be used to devise more effective poverty reduction efforts.

Over a dozen presentations were given during the meeting, showcasing different experiences in addressing multidimensional poverty and/or designing national and subnational multidimensional measures.

Highlights include

• Videos and slides from presentations given by 16 governments on their steps toward developing multidimensional measures of poverty;
• Keynote speeches from Hon Dr Kenny Anthony, Prime Minister of Saint Lucia; HE Margarita Cedeño de Fernández, Vice-President of the Dominican Republic; HE Ana Helena Chacón Echeverría, Second Vice President of Costa Rica; and Juan Manuel Valle Pereña, Executive Director of the Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation, Government of Mexico;
• A roundtable discussion about multidimensional poverty in the post-2015 development agenda.

The high-level meeting furthers the network’s mission to provide international support to policymakers engaged in or exploring the construction of multidimensional poverty measures. It provided a forum for South-South exchanges on topics such as measurement design, how to embed a new measure within government, and the use of new measures in the policies to better eradicate poverty.

The meeting was the first high-level meeting of the Network since its launch in Oxford in June 2013.