NEW YORK/OXFORD, UK, Sep 18 (IPS) – Political polarisation, the climate emergency, organised crime, migration and low economic growth currently dominate public debate in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and rightly so. However, there is a significant structural challenge to human development and democracy itself that, together with inequalities, is at the root of these crises: poverty.
Today, 181 million people, 29% of the region’s population, live in monetary poverty and 33 million suffer from acute multidimensional poverty (considering only countries with available data). Moving forward towards a prosperous and resilient LAC requires putting poverty in all its forms and dimensions back at the centre of public debate and finding new responses through public policies.
In recent decades, the region has significantly reduced poverty by capitalizing on the economic growth generated by the commodity boom and introducing innovative government policies aimed at solving this problem, such as conditional cash transfers. These are schemes in which households living in poverty receive money in exchange for specific investments in human development, such as ensuring school attendance or participation in vaccination campaigns.
However, this trend began to reverse two years before the pandemic.
To revitalize the poverty eradication agenda, we need to resume this innovative capacity and political will. We have done it in the past, we must do it again, and it is possible. Brazil’s recent proposal to the G20 to promote a Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty is an excellent step in this direction.
To achieve this, it is essential to better understand and measure the different forms and dimensions of poverty, ensure effective inter-institutional coordination for policy design and implementation, and refine the targeting and allocation of resources through new planning instruments. Given the context of low economic growth and limited fiscal space, efficiency is key to accelerating important achievements.
Ensuring that people in poverty have the opportunities and chances to live the lives they want requires tools that capture their realities and experiences, including the many forms of deprivation that affect them on different levels and that go beyond a lack of income.
Not having access to education, water, or health care, to name a few, are significant deprivations that may or may not be linked to having money. For example, someone may have enough income to not be considered poor, but still not have access to health care because there is no hospital nearby.
The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), launched in 2010 by UNDP and OPHI, complements the measurement and analysis of extreme financial poverty with information on the situation of people across multiple socio-economic dimensions.
The MPI has been adopted by countries around the world as an official measure of poverty. It complements income-based measures and focuses on the priorities of each country. This makes them effective public policy tools that can more accurately identify who and where is poor, and how poverty varies by age, gender, region and ethnicity.
Latin America has been a pioneer in adopting national MPIs, with 12 countries and two major cities—Mexico City and Bogotá—and can again be a reference for poverty reduction. The success of conditional cash transfers in the past has meant a quantitative leap in the usefulness of monetary poverty data.
It is time to replicate this success by developing new, transformative policies that have the same effect on the usability of multidimensional data, leveraging the planning, policy-making and monitoring opportunities offered by the rich information gained from the complementary use of both metrics.
In Honduras, for example, multidimensional data was used to better identify which populations are most vulnerable to COVID-19 and to target financial support more precisely.
On the other hand, a clear articulation between other national policies and poverty reduction targets will also be crucial to achieve greater impact. Policies such as those related to productivity, energy or climate change are often defined in a sectoral way, despite their potential to accelerate poverty reduction.
These links need to be formalized. It is also important to invite actors outside the public sector to include these analyses and actions to accelerate poverty reduction as part of their development strategies. For example, the Colombian Association of Natural Gas Producers (Naturgas) has created an index of strategic municipalities.
This explicitly includes an equity dimension via poverty-related variables in addition to business variables that are typically used by private companies in their decision-making processes. This index generates incentives to invest in areas with higher poverty, while respecting the natural profit-seeking nature of these companies.
If we want to eradicate poverty in all its dimensions, we need to put poverty and inequality back on the public agenda and create space for dialogue, collaboration and consensus around innovative and transformative public policies that can help us move towards more equal and inclusive societies.
Only in this way are we on the way to achieving sustainable development in LAC. Let us not wait any longer and take the leap we need in public innovation for a well-being and human development that leaves no one behind.
Michelle Muschett is Director of the Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); Sabina Alkire is Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford.
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© Inter Press Service (2024) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
