Social Protection and Multidimensional Poverty: How can multidimensional measures become a social protection system tool?

Countries around the globe have started establishing social protection systems, aiming to implement policies and programmes to reduce poverty. At the same time, the number of countries designing and computing multidimensional poverty measures has increased in recent years, with more than 40 countries in the five world regions having official multidimensional poverty measures and others working on designing their own national Multidimensional Poverty Indices (MPI).

Social protection can be understood from a transformative perspective, where aspects related to prevention and promotion become fundamental. When social protection is defined beyond income poverty reduction policies and includes the provision of social programmes and services, the perspective of multidimensional poverty becomes relevant.

Although social protection programmes are usually associated with cash transfers, the recognition of their impact on other dimensions of poverty has increased in recent years. Indeed, in the last decade, cash-plus programmes have become a commonly used way to implement social protection programmes, including cash transfers complemented by support programmes that aim to increase people’s capability to overcome poverty.

In addition, regions such as Latin America have established conditional cash transfers since the 1990s. Their main objective is to reduce intergenerational poverty and increase access to health and education for poor children. Although the main strategy of these programmes is to provide a cash transfer, all establish conditions for continuing to receive the benefit, which are related to taking children to school and health services. Therefore, it has a direct effect on the health and education of children.

With this in mind, it becomes relevant to ask how multidimensional poverty measures can be used in social protection systems and whether national MPIs can be used to design, implement, and evaluate social protection programmes.

Four potential uses of multidimensional poverty measures exist in social protection systems:

1. Identification and targeting

2. Planning and design

3. Monitoring

4. Evaluation

Identification and targeting: Multidimensional poverty measures such as Multidimensional Poverty Indices (MPIs) and Multidimensional Vulnerability Indices (MVIs) can identify individuals with high levels of deprivation or poverty. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Honduras designed an MVI whose main objective was to identify beneficiaries of an in-kind transference (Bono Unico).

The MVI was intended to capture individuals at a higher risk of being negatively affected by the quarantine measures implemented in 2020. Other countries have also used national MPIs to prioritise regions or provinces so that resources can be allocated to those regions with a more significant number of poor people or who present the highest percentage of deprived individuals. Still others have included geographical targeting to prioritise territories that will receive social protection benefits.

Planning and design: Given the large amount of data produced by the MPI and the fact that it is possible to create poverty profiles for individuals, households, districts or regions using the MPI, this information can be used for planning social protection baskets, and for designing comprehensive social protection programmes. For example, a study in Guatemala analysed the main combinations of indicators at the municipal level and proposed baskets of programmes that could be implemented in order to reduce multidimensional poverty in each municipality.

Programmes can also be designed to respond to the needs of persons who are living in multidimensional poverty. For example, a programme which includes actions in different aspects of poverty can propose activities depending on the composition of poverty of individuals and households.

Monitoring: Multidimensional poverty measures can be used to monitor changes for individuals and households that are beneficiaries of social programmes. This information can provide evidence on how individuals have changed during the implementation of the programme and can define potential modifications of programmes. One example is Red Unidos in Colombia, a programme which aimed to reduce extreme poverty. This programme used the Colombian national MPI as a tool to design the set of programmes which a household received and to monitor the progress that individual and households made. In this context, households were assessed using the MPI structure, and once a household and all its members were not deprived, the household graduated from the programme.

Evaluation: Finally, multidimensional measures can be used to evaluate the impact of social protection programmes. Different studies have used MPIs to assess the effect of cash transfers on other dimensions of poverty. In this case, changes to deprivation or multidimensional poverty can be analysed, or a multidimensional measure can be designed to analyse changes in the incidence, intensity, and censored headcount ratios as a result of an intervention or social protection programme.

In general, multidimensional measures, including national MPIs or MVIs, can be used in different stages of the implementation of social protection programmes. When poverty is recognised as a multidimensional phenomenon, multidimensional measures can be used to inform the process of implementing comprehensive programmes to reduce poverty.

Although, to date, only a few programmes have been implemented from a multidimensional perspective, more and more programmes are complementing cash transfers with the provision of social services, an approach that moves from an income perspective on social protection to a transformative one, and where multidimensional measures can play a fundamental role.

 

This article was published in Dimensions 17