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Measuring Urban Poverty
Written by IRIN
Tuesday, 28 August 2012
What urban poverty looks like
As more people migrate into cities, experts try to find ways to define
their condition
In a world where more than half of the population lives in cities,
poverty is increasingly an urban phenomenon. As researchers and aid agencies
struggle to distinguish between chronic poverty and acute vulnerability, IRIN
reviewed efforts to measure city dwellers’ poverty and vulnerability in
life-threatening scenarios.
More than two-thirds of the world’s urban population lives in low- and
middle-income countries where nearly 1 billion are living in slums, mostly in
sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, according to the World Bank.
As more people pour into cities often ill-equipped to handle the influx,
experts are trying to find ways of defining and measuring urban poverty. Their
findings influence humanitarian policy and programs as well as basic services,
including health, water and sanitation and education.
Historically, measurements have looked at a person’s income
(“consumption” poverty), or what a person can get in return for their cash and
assets; the fulfillment of basic needs, including food, health, water and
sanitation, education and shelter; capabilities - a concept the Indian Nobel
laureate and economist, Amartya Sen, developed throughout the 1990s - which
measure basic needs fulfillment as well as what individuals are able to
accomplish, and a “multidimensional” index, which is a recent effort to make
poverty measurement more holistic.
Income measurements
The World Bank has fixed poverty measures, based largely on an
international poverty line set at 2005 international prices, or close to
US$1.25 a day in low-income countries, and $2 for middle-income countries. This
international poverty standard has been applied to household survey findings to
determine who falls below these two levels.
At the $1.25-a-day measure of global poverty, there were between 336 and
472 million people in chronic poverty in 2005. However, the poverty standard
has not been updated since then, while the cost of living has significantly
increased, and experts warn that using this index grossly underestimates the
current number of people trapped in chronic poverty.
Chronic poverty is multi-year and often inter-generational, as opposed to
a shock or temporary loss, which often occurs post-disaster and may lead to
“extreme” or “severe” poverty. Regardless of the type of poverty, experts say
income is an incomplete measure. “It is difficult to compare urban and rural
poverty with income measures,” said Jose Manuel Roche, researcher at the Oxford
Poverty and Human Development Initiative. “With income measurements, rural
poverty would appear too high compared to urban poverty… there are aspects of
well-being, such as employment or violence, that are not captured and not
included in the household surveys.”
Income measurements often underestimate urban poverty because they do not
factor in the higher cost of food in cities, which must generally be
transported farther, and housing.
Multidimensional measures
The reasons people are poor are as varied as the numbers who are poor,
notes the UK-based Chronic Poverty Research Center. People are trapped in
poverty by combinations of insecurity, poor work opportunities, location,
limited citizenship rights and discrimination.
In Bangladesh the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day in
cities dropped from 20 percent in 2000 to 15 percent in 2005. However, the
capital, Dhaka, was recently rated the least livable city among 140 surveyed by
the UK-based Economist Intelligence Unit, based on 30 factors that included
stability, health care, culture, environment, education and infrastructure.
A 2011 study of the Sri Lankan national poverty line concluded the
standard did not capture multidimensional poverty, where the “non-poor” in
cities have unmet basic needs. Half of the population in the capital, Colombo,
live in informal settlements, according to the UK-based NGO, Homeless
International.
In 2010, the Oxford poverty institute attempted to develop a more
holistic assessment of poverty with its Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) to
capture simultaneous deprivations in health, education and living standards.
The MPI estimates the intensity of poverty and replaced the human poverty index
(HPI), used until then in UN annual human development reports.
The MPI uses the three HPI measurements of living standards, health and
education, as well as an additional 10 indicators that reflect some of the
Millennium Development Goals. Whereas the HPI used country averages to reflect
overall deprivation, it did not identify vulnerable groups, communities,
households or individuals, which the MPI is designed to identify.
Determining who is poor is an exercise undergoing constant analysis and
refinement. “A household, which is not in poverty in terms of food consumption,
could be in poverty in some other dimension,” said Mayadunne from CEPA. “Those
different estimates arising from different definitions should be explored
further in the future.”
Urban emergencies
Urban poor tend to face a number of common deprivations: limited access
to income and employment; inadequate and insecure living conditions, and poor
infrastructure. Slum-dwellers have been among the most affected in recent urban
deluges, while undocumented residents - whether migrants, refugees or families
fleeing violence - are cut off from state services year-round.
Counting the poor is one thing, but identifying who needs help is
another, as aid agencies increasingly find in responding to man-made and
natural disasters in cities.
Citing increased threats faced by cities, the UN Development Programme
(UNDP) recently pledged to double its overall support for disaster reduction
over the next five years, while a recent Active Learning Network for
Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP) meeting was
devoted to “adapting humanitarian efforts to an urban world”.
The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), composed of humanitarian
assistance groups, set up a task force in 2009 to meet humanitarian challenges
in urban areas, which has compiled dozens of tools to identify city-dwellers in
need of urgent assistance.
The very people most in need of help often seek urban refuges for their
anonymity, obscuring efforts to count, identify and help them, said François
Grünewald, executive director of the research, training and evaluation group,
Urgence, Réhabilitation et Développement, located in France.
“People come to cities to disappear, so you cannot cut and paste tools
used in other places [to target them]. There needs to be a different way of
doing things in cities.”
(IRIN is a news service of the United Nations Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affairs. This report does not necessarily reflect the views of
the United Nations.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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