The Chronic Poverty Report 2014-2015: The road to zero extreme poverty

With the debate on the post-2015 development framework in full swing, the third international Chronic Poverty Report addresses one key question: what needs to be done to get to (or close to) zero extreme poverty by 2030 – the new goal for global poverty reduction?

The report is the first produced by the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN), the successor to the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), which produced the first two Chronic Poverty Reports. Drawing on ten years of research by the CPRC and others, and on recent policy guides from CPAN, it presents new analysis of what it takes to sustain escapes from poverty; of countries that have succeeded in tackling chronic poverty; and new projections of poverty in 2030.

It presents a tripartite challenge to the world: to get close to zero extreme poverty countries need to tackle chronic poverty, stop impoverishment and ensure that those who manage to escape from poverty sustain their escapes (the poverty ‘tripod’). It also raises the spectre that there may remain a billion people living in extreme poverty in 2030 unless existing policies are implemented robustly and new policies and political commitments are up and running by 2020.

The bulk of the report focuses on the policies needed to get to zero. While there are many such policies, any country could and should be able to generate a selection of the key policies that will work with the national grain, and the report offers a device – the impoverishment index – to help countries determine the priorities that will carry their citizens out of poverty.

Development Co-operation Report 2013: Ending Poverty

This article by Ousmane Aly DIALLO, is part of Wikiprogress Series on the Post 2015. It highlights the main points of the recent Development Cooperation Report 2013.

The Development Co-operation Report (DCR) is the key annual reference document for analysis and statistics on trends in international development co-operation. This year, the DCR explores what needs to be done to achieve rapid and sustainable progress in the global fight to end poverty. 

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) galvanized political support for poverty reduction. The world has probably already met the MDG target of halving the share of the population living in extreme poverty (USD 1.25 per day). Yet progress towards the MDGs across countries, localities, population groups and gender has been uneven, reflecting a fundamental weakness in current approaches. As the United Nations and its partners shape a new global framework to take the place of the MDGs in 2015 , they face the urgent challenge of ending poverty once and for all. As this Development Co-operation Report (DCR) makes clear, this will take more than business as usual.

New goals for ending poverty

To recapture the Millennium Declaration’s vision, the new international development agenda must reflect principles of solidarity, equality, dignity and respect for nature. Its goals must effectively guide core aspirations, targets must be easy to monitor, and must include strategies for economic and social transformation. The report made numerous proposals for developing these elements, including:

Move from poverty to inclusive well-being

Create a new headline indicator to measure progress towards eradicating all forms of poverty, which could complement the current income-poverty indicator

Include targets and indicators to track whether people are becoming newly poor.

Include a goal of reducing income inequality, or a set of indicators of inequality across the various goals.

Take a twin-track approach to gender: a goal for gender equality and women’s empowerment coupled with a way of revealing gender gaps in all other goals and targets

Combine national and global goals and responsibilities

Base a new global goal of reducing income poverty on national poverty measures that are internationally co-ordinated and consistent.

Make the new agenda applicable to all countries, but with responsibilities that vary accordingto a country’s starting point, capabilities and resources.

Set targets nationally but within global minimum standards.

Improve data for tracking progress

Adopt a specific goal, target and indicator to increase the availability and quality of data fortracking progress towards these new goals, and invest in national statistical capacity

The report stresses the ambition and the credibility of this goal (ending poverty once for all) and as well as the importance of sound political leadership to achieve it. In Africa, during the last 13 years, the leadership of the late Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and his 

 focus on development results, food security and poverty reduction have been exemplary. The reports highlights also the successes of Ghanaian presidents hailing from different political parties, but who have coincided in championing poverty reduction and food security for the poorest. This has enabled Ghana to implement a successful development strategy focused on building the private sector, developing human resources and implementing good governance. Furthermore

Balancing Poverty and Environmental Sustainability

While it is not always easy to balance poverty reduction with environmental sustainability, important progress is being made. Over the past decade, for instance, Brazil has greatly reduced extreme poverty and inequality while at the same time cutting deforestation by 80%. Ethiopia aims to become a middle-income country without increasing its greenhouse gas emissions and has developed the innovative Climate- Resilient Green Economy strategy to guide it in doing so.

The role of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation

The Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation is just what is needed. This unique coalition of governments, civil society, the private sector and international institutions was launched at the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan in 2011. Its aim is to catalyse and co-ordinate global efforts and resources for more effective development. The Global Partnership will play a key role in helping development actors work together, discuss the pros and cons of diverse policies and instruments, share good practice, foster collaboration and promote concrete action – crucial pre-conditions for successfully implementing the post-2015 development agenda. It is up to all of us, now, to make use of this novel, inclusive partnership to improve our development co-operation efforts.

Development Co-operation Report 2013 - Ending Poverty - Highlights

Can We Really End Poverty? A debate on the Future of Development

At the 2000 UN Millennium Summit, the largest ever gathering of world leaders pledged to work together to help the world’s poorest people. They agreed on a set of targets that became known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The deadline they set themselves to meet these was 31 December 2015.

With just over two years until the MDGs expire, how much progress has been made and what should happen next?

There have of course been successes: the world has already met the first MDG target of halving the world’s population living in extreme poverty (on less than USD 1.25 per day). But 1.2 billion people are still living in extreme poverty and vulnerability remains high. At the same time, problems in measuring poverty present barriers to effective policy making.

Progress has also been uneven – not all countries, regions, age groups, social sectors or genders have benefited equally from the advances that have been made. The truth is, the quality of life has not improved for all.

This December, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) will launch their new report on Ending Poverty. To coincide with this, Intelligence Squared will host a panel of experts to discuss the key issues that the report raises. How should we measure poverty? What can we learn from local solutions for tackling poverty? How can the fast progress made by middle-income countries like China provide lessons for Africa? How can we be “smarter” about how we use aid flows? How do we ensure that the next set of goals will be not just about “getting to zero” poverty, but about staying there?

On 5 December, thought-leaders from the world’s leading development think tanks, the OECD, civil society and national governments will offer different perspectives on these questions, and discuss what an international development framework could look like beyond 2015.

Watch the debate live-stream from 7pm-8.30pm on 5th December.

Speakers

• Sabina Alkire, Director at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford 
• Jamie Drummond, Executive Director and Head of Global Strategy at ONE 
• Homi Kharas (via Google+ Hangouts), Executive Secretary of the UN High Level Panel on the post-2015 development agenda. Senior Fellow and Deputy Director for the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution 
• Priyanthi Fernando, Executive Director for the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) in Colombo, Sri Lanka
•  Erik Solheim, Chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee and Former Minister of the Environment and International Development, Norway     

The unknown people battling the world’s neglected diseases

To accompany this blog, the author has prepared a slide show on Flickr of images from her field research in Sierra Leone.

For the world’s poorest, difficult living conditions are often compounded by the prevalence of a threat to their health that for many years barely appeared on the global health agenda – a group of ailments known as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Ninety per cent of the NTD burden can be explained by five diseases: Onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness(causing terrible itching and lesions on the eye), Schistosomiasis or bilharzia (causing extensive organ damage), Lymphatic Filariasis, also known as elephantiasis (causing damage to the lymphatic system and painful enlargement of body parts), Soil Transmitted Helminths (causing diarrhoea, abdominal pain, chronic intestinal blood loss and anaemia) and Trachoma (the world's leading cause of preventable blindness).

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

I first came across NTDs while conducting research for the health dimension of the Development Progressproject. I’ve been working on development - and particularly on health - for some time now, so it was quite a surprise to me that I had never heard of them before (I remember thinking: ‘well, indeed they are neglected!’). As part of the project, I had the opportunity to travel to Sierra Leone to conduct field research and see first-hand how NTDs are being addressed.

Sierra Leone was chosen because of the progress it has made in recent years in tackling NTDs. For instance, in 2005, elephantiasis was found endemic in all 14 health districts in Sierra Leone; by 2011, only one district remained endemic. In the case of river blindness, therapeutic coverage has consistently been over 70% since 2006, with the programme’s geographical coverage consistently reaching 100% since 2007, translating into an overall reduction in prevalence of 60.3% between 2007 and 2009.

By far the most striking aspect of the field research was meeting those on the frontline of the fight against NTDs. Known as Community Drug Distributors (CDDs), they are the most humble people you could meet, with scarce resources and no monetary incentives to do their job. Selected by their own communities, once a year they have the responsibility of distributing drugs to fight NTDs, with each CDD covering their catchment area over a period of three months.

Why has this experience of meeting the CDDs had such an impact on me? After all, community involvement is a well-known strategy to implement programmes in a resource-constrained setting. Well, in the case of NTDs, we are talking about a vastly different scale to normal – the strategy implemented through the CDDs is known as ‘mass drug administration’ (MDA). For an MDA campaign to be successful it must reach every corner of the country where NTDs are endemic (in Sierra Leone, this is the entire country) and at least 70%-80% of the people living in those areas. This is because most of these diseases, whilst transmitted by vectors, only develop in a human host. It is therefore necessary to reduce their prevalence in the community to a sufficient level that allows for the gradual interruption of disease transmission. Without meeting this target, all efforts will be in vain.

While on the ground in Sierra Leone, travelling through the countryside by 4x4 under a burning hot sun, I couldn’t help but feel admiration for the CDDs, who undertake similar and often even more remote journeys but on foot. During focus group discussions, they told us how they sometimes walk for four hours to reach the farthest and most remote settlements; once there, they still need to convince community members to take these vital drugs. Sometimes they must cross rivers, or walk in the rain (and I mean serious rain!) to cover their assigned catchment area, and all without what we in wealthier countries might consider the necessary outdoor wear.

Perhaps not surprisingly, when you talk with the CDDs, you hear a lot of complaints - that the job is very hard, that they need incentives and support beyond just their free CDD t-shirts and that they are sometimes not received kindly by those they are there to treat, particularly in the early days of a campaign. As I listened to all their troubles, I kept coming back to the question: ‘Why are you still doing this?’

The reason is a sense of community - the manner in which the NTD control programme is implemented empowers CDDs with an important role to play within their communities, despite the lack of financial reward. The CDDs are clear and straight forward when answering this point: they are doing this to help their communities, because they themselves have seen how the distribution of medicines has reduced the harm caused by NTDs amongst their peers. One told us: ‘I was sick with worms in the past and then I took the drugs and they relieved me, so I want to pass on the message and contribute’.

Their commitment is paying off. A key development actor told us how in the past he would go to certain towns and the majority of the people had lost their sight due to river blindness. Returning to those places after years had passed and after the work of the CDDs had begun, he could see the change in plain sight: far fewer people were blind.

Throughout our fieldwork, people gave testimony to the work of the CDDs, such as one woman who said: 'I was reluctant to take the medicine. We were suspicious but the CDDs explained to us why it was important. After taking the medicine, my itching stopped and I could see much better'. Thanks to their early efforts in reaching out to their peers, initial reluctance to take the drugs has faded and nowadays people start asking for the drugs even before the distribution campaigns start. 

CDDs are one, but a seemingly essential, part of this story of progress. The fight against NTDs is a collective effort, comprising many actors, from the World Health Organisation setting international guidelines and the support of a range of international partners, to Ministries of Health developing these guidelines into strategies for local implementation, non-state actors such as NGOs providing technical assistance and pharmaceutical companies donating the drugs themselves to fight the diseases on the ground. However, all these efforts would be doomed to fail without those at the sharp end of the fight, walking throughout their communities to distribute the drugs and convince their peers of the positive impact they can have in their lives.

View a slide show on Flickr of images from Romina’s field research in Sierra Leone

This blog by Romina Rodriguez Pose of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) contributes to the Wikiprogress Series on Health. It originally appeared on the ODI's Development Progress blog. 

Mesurer la pauvreté multidimensionnelle: cadres conceptuels, identification des facteurs et robustesse aux schémas de pondération

Ce billet est une synthèse de l'étude de Khalid Soudi et de Siham Jouilile sur la mesure de la pauvreté multidimensionnelle. L'étude est disponible dans son intégralité, ici

A travers cette étude, une démarche empirique a été développée pour mesurer la pauvreté multidimensionnelle. En se référant au cadre conceptuel des capacités développé par A. Sen, une liste de fonctionnements centraux et basiques a été choisie en combinant une approche quantitative d’inertie, fondée sur l’ACP non linéaire, et une approche qualitative de perception de privation qui intègre la voix des pauvres.

Dans le cadre de ce travail, pour garder un recul par rapport aux limites inhérentes aux conceptions méthodologiques, deux approches de mesure ont été mises en application avec le même schéma de pondération : 

1.  l’approche d’Alkire & Foster (AF) ;
2.  et  l’approche des ensembles flous.

L’objectif consiste à tester la robustesse des résultats obtenus, et à voir comment notre conception et les mesures de la pauvreté multidimensionnelle dépendent du cadre conceptuel de mesure des indices composites.

D’emblée, pour tester la robustesse des résultats obtenus aux poids attribués aux items définissant l’espace de privation, les indices de pauvreté multidimensionnelle ont été mesurés selon un éventail de schémas de pondération.

L’analyse conduite s’articule autour de trois axes. Le premier axe présente et compare les résultats obtenus selon l’approche d’AF en adoptant différents schémas de pondération. Le deuxième axe compare les résultats obtenus selon l’approche de logique floue et l’approche d’AF, et ce en expérimentant différents schémas de pondération .Quant au troisième axe, il présente les résultats de l’approche de logique floue en se référant à des fonctions d’appartenance calculant le degré de privation individuelle sans affaiblissement de l’information contenue dans les variables de base. Ainsi, les variables quantitatives et polytomiques ont été traitées sans transformation préalable en variables dichotomiques.

Les résultats obtenus montrent que tous les schémas de pondération structurés par dimension donnent lieu à des indices de pauvreté (taux de pauvreté, indice de pauvreté multidimensionnelle (MPI), vulnérabilité à la pauvreté et pauvreté sévère) significativement inférieurs à ceux mesurés par le schéma de pondération proposé par AF. Ensuite, il s’avère, pour le moment, que ce dernier surestime le taux de pauvreté en comparaison avec les autres schémas de pondération. La dominance stochastique des courbes de pauvreté a permis de confirmer la robustesse de ces résultats. 

La non hiérarchisation des attributs de privation par dimension montre, quelle que soit la pondération retenue, une surévaluation des indices de la pauvreté multidimensionnelle. Cette tendance se vérifie au niveau de tous les schémas de pondération et concerne tous les indices de la pauvreté multidimensionnelle. Au vu de ces résultats, il s’avère important de repenser la structuration de l’approche AF pour remédier aux biais inhérents à la hiérarchisation des indicateurs par dimension.

En se plaçant dans le cadre méthodologique proposé par l’approche AF (hiérarchisation des items de privation par dimension), les résultats de l’approche de logique floue montrent que, quel que soit le schéma de pondération adopté, les taux de pauvreté multidimensionnelle obtenus sont inférieurs à ceux émanant de l’approche d’AF. Les écarts constatés deviennent plus significatifs en adoptant le schéma de pondération proposé par AF.

Tableau 5 : indices de la pauvreté multidimensionnelle. Comparaison entre les approches de logique floue et d'Alkire-Foster. Cas de la pondération égale par dimension et par attribut Hiérarchisation des attributs par dimension

	Composantes basiques et centraux du bien-être	Pondération			Approche logique floue			Approche Alkire et Foster
					Indice unidimensionnel (%)	Contribution Relative (%)		Taux de pauvreté censuré (%)						Contribution Relative (%)
Dimension 1 : Capital scolaire
Scolarisation des enfants		0.083	13.7			12.1			5.8						11.2
Scolarisation des adultes		0.083	15.9			14.1			5.7						10.9
Dimension 2 : Santé maternelle et nutrition des enfants
Nutrition des enfants		0.056	4.0			2.4				1.3						1.6
Consultation médicale		0.056	10.5			6.2				1.8						2.3
Accouchement en milieu surveillé		0.056	15.8			6.2				5.5						6.9
Dimension 3 : Cadre de vie
Électricité		0.042	14.8			6.6					6.1						5.9
Eau		0.042	7.3			3.2					2.5						2.4
Équipements sanitaires		0.042	17.7			7.8					6.4						6.1
Équipements ménagers		0.042	11.8			5.2					5.1						4.9
Dimension 4 : Participation au marché du travail
Pouvoir exercer un emploi		0.167	7.7			13.6							1.7					6.4
Dimension 5 : Consommation courante
Se pourvoir en viandes rouges ou blanches et au poisson		0.167			5.2	9.2						4.6								17.5
Dimension 6 : Pouvoir économique
Inégalité de revenu		0.167		7.7			13.5					6.2							23.9
Taux de pauvreté multidimensionnelle (%)					9.45								11.7
Intensité de pauvreté													37.3
Indice de pauvreté multidimensionnelle (MPI) (%)													4.36
Taux de vulnérabilité													15.0
Pauvreté sévère													3.2

Source : données de base de l’ENNVM 2007, HCP.

La non hiérarchisation des indicateurs par dimension approfondit ces écarts. Par ailleurs, cette divergence montre également la tendance prononcée de l’approche AF à surévaluer l’incidence de pauvreté en comparaison avec l’approche de logique floue.

D’emblée, en se référant à des fonctions d’appartenance calculant le degré de privation individuelle sans affaiblissement de l’information contenue dans les variables de base, les taux de pauvreté multidimensionnelle obtenus selon l’approche de logique floue, tout en montrant une sensibilité importante aux schémas de pondération, restent également et largement inférieurs à ceux obtenus selon l’approche AF.

En dernier lieu, il n’est pas moins important de préciser que l’apport de ce travail est de mettre en lumière certaines limites inhérentes aux approches de mesure de la pauvreté multidimensionnelle. C’est un préalable pour toute utilisation avertie de ces approches et des enseignements qui en découlent. Encore est-il nécessaire de considérer cette contribution comme une première étape pour bien fonder les développements analytiques se rapportant au profil de la pauvreté multidimensionnelle, l’analyse de ses facteurs et de sa reproduction sociale, et le ciblage des politiques publiques de lutte contre la pauvreté, la vulnérabilité à l’appauvrissement et les inégalités de privation.

Khalid Soudi et Siham Jouilile
Haut-Commissariat au Plan du Maroc

Gouvernance, croissance économique et lutte contre la pauvreté:liens et éléments de politiques

Le texte ci-dessous  est un résumé d'une publication d'Abdeslam NADA du Haut-Commissariat au Plan du Maroc. Le document est accessible dans son intégralité, en cliquant ici

Cette étude d’Abdeslam NADA du Haut-Commissariat au Plan du Maroc analyse les liens entre la gouvernance (politique et économique) et la pauvreté. L’auteur commence par mettre en évidence les liens de causalité entre la gouvernance et les rythmes de croissance économique. Considérant la croissance économique comme une « condition nécessaire pour la réduction de la pauvreté », l’auteur soutient que la gouvernance permet d’améliorer l’efficacité des politiques dédiées à la lutte contre la pauvreté. 

Définissant la pauvreté selon l’approche monétaire (moins de 2$ US par jour), l’auteur utilise les taux correspondant au seuil de pauvreté national pour décrire l’état de pauvreté au Maroc (2,15 $US PPA en 2007) et procéder à l’analyse quantitative des liens entre pauvreté et gouvernance dans ce pays.  Partant des six indicateurs retenus par la Banque Mondiale pour mesurer la bonne gouvernance (Écoute des citoyens et reddition des comptes ; Stabilité politique et absence de violence ; Efficacité des pouvoirs publics ; Qualité de la réglementation  et État de droit), Nada finit par choisir comme variable indépendante, l’efficacité du gouvernement pour son exhaustivité (« car il renseigne sur la qualité des services publics, la performance administrative, la qualité d’élaboration et d’application des politiques ainsi que sur la crédibilité de l’engagement des pouvoirs publics à l’égard de ces politiques », p.5).

Les estimations de l’analyse ont montré la corrélation négative  entre l’efficacité du gouvernement et le taux de pauvreté. En général, les pays ayant une qualité de gouvernance élevée, enregistrent un taux de pauvreté réduit. Inversement, les pays disposant d’une faible qualité de gouvernance, enregistrent un taux de pauvreté élevé.

L’étude montre en outre que la qualité de la gouvernance a un impact sur le taux de pauvreté, à travers la croissance économique. Sans un cadre institutionnel sein et des mesures d’autonomisation ciblées sur les populations les plus exposées, la pauvreté a plus de chance de se pérenniser dans les États. Cela impose aux différents gouvernements de mettre en œuvre des politiques publiques investissant dans le domaine du bien-être des populations, à travers l’éducation, la santé et l’emploi. Et c’est dans ce cadre que se trouve l’Initiative Nationale pour le Développement Humain (INDH) qui a eu un impact significatif dans ce domaine. « En effet, selon l’enquête réalisée en 2009 par le Haut-commissariat au Plan portant sur l’accès des populations ciblées par cette Initiative aux infrastructures de base et aux services socio-économiques, 46% des chefs de ménages bénéficiaires considèrent que leurs conditions de vie se sont améliorées (42,1% dans les quartiers urbains et 50,8% dans les communes rurales) » (Page 11).

En conclusion, Abdeslam NADA recommande quelques pistes d’amélioration de la gouvernance à travers la mise en place d’un cadre favorable à la croissance économique et aux investissements et le renforcement de la cohérence et de l’anticipation dans les actions de l’Etat.  De même l’auteur met l’accent sur les politiques pro-pauvres en recommandant un meilleur suivi-évaluation afin de renforcer leur impact, l’intégration entre les différents paliers de gouvernements et à  travers des programmes spécifiques à l’éducation, la santé et l’emploi.

Pour lire l'étude d'Abdeslam NADA (Haut-Commissariat au Plan du Maroc) dans son intégralité, cliquez ici

Ousmane Aly DIALLO
Coordonnateur Wikiprogress Africa