30 October 2018. The 6th Annual High-Level Meeting of the Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network (MPPN) kicked off today in Johannesburg, South Africa.

We are very pleased to announce that the 6thHigh Level MPPN Annual Meeting will be held 30 October – 1 November in Johannesburg, South Africa. The meeting will be generously hosted by Statistics South Africa with support from the Department of Social Development and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development initiative.

The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index Report: The Most Detailed Picture to Date of the World’s Poorest People presents the global MPI 2018, a newly revised index based on a short but powerful list of 10 deprivations. During the launch of the Global MPI 2018, Achim Steiner further highlights that if development is about being more precise about directing the limited resources governments have and the indicators of the global MPI can aid that process. The revised global MPI is the joint work of OPHI and UNDP. The overarching aim of the revised MPI is to better align the global MPI with the SDGs (Alkire and Jahan 2018).

India has reduced its poverty rate drastically from 55% to 28% in ten years. 271 million people moved out of poverty between 2005/6 and 2015/16. While progress has been remarkable, the country still has the largest number of people living in multidimensional poverty in the world (364 million people).

On September 12, Panama launched the National Child MPI, which is the first official child MPI in Latin-American. The Child MPI has five dimensions (Health, education, water and sanitation, housing and child protection) and 10 indicators (two per dimension). It uses nested weights and a poverty line equal to 30%, meaning that a child is multidimensionally poor if she is deprived in 3 or more indicators.