Swedish Development Cooperation Agency’s Multidimensional View of Poverty

The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) has published a new poverty toolbox to support the integration of multidimensional poverty to its work.

Sida identifies four dimensions of poverty: resources, opportunities and choice, power and voice, and human security. These dimensions help identifying the main ways in which poverty manifests itself and how it is experienced by people living in poverty.

Sida’s approach identify people as being poor in terms of resources if they have no access to or power over resources that can be used to sustain a decent standard of living, meet basic needs and improve one’s life. Resources can be both material and non-material: a decent income or physical and human capital.

Being poor in terms of opportunities and choice concerns one’s possibilities to develop and/or use the resources to move out of poverty. Access to productive employment, education, health clinics, infrastructure, energy, markets and information affect the choices available and opportunities to escape from poverty.

Being poor through lacking power and voice relates to people’s ability to articulate their concerns, needs and rights in an informed way, and to take part in decision-making affecting these concerns.

In turn, being poor in terms of human security means that violence and insecurity are constraints to different groups’ and individuals’ possibilities to exercise their human rights and to find paths out of poverty.

 

Source: Poverty Toolbox, Sida.