The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) would launch the Ghana Multidimensional Poverty Report on July 29, 2020.
The Multidimensional Poverty Report, which is the first of its kind in Ghana, aimed at assessing poverty from a multidimensional approach to end poverty in all its forms everywhere to meet Sustainable Development Goal 1.
The report was jointly prepared by GSS, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) with technical support from the Oxford Poverty Human Development Initiative (OPHI).
At a day virtual training programme for the media on the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), the Director of Programmes and Operations of OPHI, Miss Corinne Mitchell, said the idea behind the MPI was to measure poverty from all spheres of human endeavour and not just the income gap or disparity.
“So, this report will cover areas such as deprivation in sectors like education, health, access to clean water, sanitation, housing, among others,” she added.
She said the MPI is computed using the Alkire-Foster (AF) Method of multidimensional poverty measurement, which measures selected poverty indicators such as education, food security and access to quality water by assigning values to these indicators based on their derivability.
Miss Mitchell further stated that the assigned values would then be used to compute the Incidence of Poverty (or Headcount Ratio) and Intensity of Poverty and the MPI.
According to her, the Headcount Ratio was the percentage of the total population that was multidimensionally poor, which is the percentage of the population that were deprived of at least one of the poverty indicators.
The Intensity of Poverty, on the other hand, she said, showed the percentage of the indicators, be it education, food, or housing security that the poor did not have access to.
Miss Mitchell added that MPI, which is computed by combining the incidence and intensity of poverty, ranged from 0 to 1 where 0 signifies no poverty and 1 signifies deprivation of all the possible poverty indicators.
Miss Mitchell said policymakers in the countries that have adopted the MPI were using it to complement their monetary poverty statistics, track poverty and allocate resources to specific sectors and regions.
She added that the MPI had also helped some countries to target marginalised regions, groups, and households and sub-national levels to evaluate and adjust policies that meet the needs of these groups.
Ishmael Batoma, ISD