• Over 65 year old bracket, the poorest community in SL
• Nuwara Eliya, Badulla and Monaragala recorded as districts with poorest communities

A recent study by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Sri Lanka has found that one out of every six (16%) people in Sri Lanka are multidimensionally poor, while those above the age of 65 years were observed as being poorest in the Island.

With Sri Lanka trying to emerge out of an economic crisis, it is incumbent on the policymakers to use the data created by such agencies like UNICEF to better prioritize the social safety net and create policies which target the worst affected communities, to elevate them from the poverty trap.  

According to the World Bank, “multidimensionally poor” is described as an index that captures the percentage of households in a country deprived along three dimensions of wellbeing – monetary poverty, education, and basic infrastructure services – to provide a more complete picture of poverty.

It is globally accepted that the eradication of poverty remains one the greatest global challenges and is an indispensable requirement for sustainable development.

The first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) aims to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere”, in a context where overcoming poverty in all its forms is also a central goal of the development agenda of the Government of Sri Lanka.

This was noted in a report, titled “Sri Lanka’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2019 Results: National and Child Analyses” and issued by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Sri Lanka, the Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) and Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford.

MPIs

The report explained that in 2021, in close consultation with various ministries, the DCS developed the first official national MPI (referred to as national MPI) for Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan national MPI is an official permanent statistic of multidimensional poverty that will be updated and published regularly, reported as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator 1.2.2, and used to complement the monetary poverty measure.

Adding that a key population of concern around poverty is young children, whose deprivations in nutrition and cognitive development have lifelong effects, the report explained: “To further probe and support child poverty policies, DCS crafted an individual child MPI (referred to as child MPI) for children aged 0-4, which includes exactly the same indicators as the national MPI, plus undernutrition and early childhood development. The national MPI and the child MPI are both based on data from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2019 (HIES 2019). The HIES 2019 was modified to include key MPI indicators, and will do so in future, permitting updates of both MPIs.”

Sri Lanka’s child MPI is the first official measure of child poverty that links directly and precisely with the national MPI.

“The MPI is not just a statistic, it is a policy tool. It provides relevant information to accelerate poverty reduction with limited resources – by informing high-impact budget allocation, focused interventions, policy design and coordination, and poverty monitoring,” the report further said, adding that what it presents are the key findings of Sri Lanka’s official permanent national MPI and its linked child MPI, further disaggregated by location, age and sex, and the policy implications of these findings.

The report further noted that it aims to explain why Sri Lanka was motivated to develop multidimensional poverty indices, the process followed to design these policy-salient measures, and the measurement methodology. The national MPI results convey the level and composition of multidimensional poverty, disaggregated by age, area, district, and sex of the household head, while the child MPI results delve further into an individual measure for children aged 0-4 that is directly linked to the national MPI, but which exposes particular needs of young children.

Findings

The report presented a number of national-level findings of the national MPI and the child MPI.

Under the findings of the national MPI, it explained that approximately one out of every six (16%) people in Sri Lanka are multidimensionally poor. It added that estate areas are pockets of poverty requiring policy attention as more than half (51.3%) of all people in these areas are living in poverty, while rural areas are also a key focus point as more than eight out of every 10 (80.9%) people who are poor live in rural areas. Poverty levels in districts vary significantly from a low of 3.5% in Colombo to 44.2% in Nuwara Eliya. Even for districts with similar MPI values, high-impact policies must consider the indicator composition of poverty, in order to plan the most cost-effective response. People aged 65 years and older are the poorest age group in Sri Lanka, with the highest headcount ratio (17.9%) as well as intensity of poverty and MPI. The deprivations that require immediate policy attention are the lack of access to health facilities and basic facilities, clean cooking fuels, and safe drinking water, the report said, adding that deprivation patterns – and therefore policy and budgetary responses – vary by district and age.

With regard to the child MPI, it was explained that as per the child MPI, more than four out of every 10 (42.2%) children under the age of 5 years are multidimensionally poor. All children considered poor by the national MPI are concurrently poor by individual level child MPI. In addition, the child MPI adds a fourth dimension comprising deprivations in each child’s nutrition and cognitive development. One third (33.4%) of children aged 0-4 years old are multidimensionally poor and either underweight or stunted. One sixth (16.4%) of children aged 0-4 years are multidimensionally poor and deprived in early childhood development. Nearly half of children 0-11 months and 4 years old are poor, mainly due to undernutrition, and for children who are four years old, not being in preschool. Encouragingly, there are no statistically significant differences between the poverty levels of girls and boys in Sri Lanka.

Conclusion

This report said that it has provided a comprehensive overview of multidimensional poverty, using the new official Sri Lankan national MPI and child MPI, which were estimated from HIES 2019 data and will be reported as SDG indicator 1.2.2. Although overall, 16.0% of people are poor by the national MPI, as per the report, levels vary across Sri Lanka.

It said in its conclusion: “Poverty is highest in estate areas, where over half the population are poor, and in rural areas, where over 80% of poor people live. Multidimensional poverty is highest in districts like Nuwara Eliya, Badulla and Monaragala, and also higher among people aged over 65. Policy priorities vary across regions and groups. In general, deprivations tend to be low in sanitation, chronic illness and school attendance, and high in access to health facilities, drinking water, and cooking fuel and basic facilities. The official national MPI and its associated information platform provide action oriented profiles of interlinked deprivations that policy actors in each sector, district, or priority area can use strategically to design high-impact activities.”

Noting further that the new and pioneering individual child MPI is an official companion statistic to the national MPI, the report said that measured at the individual level and covering children aged 0-4, the child MPI includes every indicator of the national MPI (all poor children by national MPI remain poor) and extends it to consider two pivotally important deprivations in Sri Lanka, i.e. undernutrition and early childhood development. By this linked child MPI, 42.2% of children 0-4 years of age are MPI poor, and an alarming one-third of young children are poor and undernourished. Shining a light on children, and profiling important gaps in preschool attendance and in active parental stimulation of cognitive development is vital because deprivations during childhood can last a lifetime.

As per the report, regardless of the abovementioned situation, there are also positive findings, such as the fact that there are no statistically significant differences between the poverty levels of girls and boys in Sri Lanka: “The aim of the national MPI in Sri Lanka is to offer clear and rigorous statistics that illuminate the level and shape of multidimensional poverty, provide relevant information on where to target, allocate budgetary resources, design multisectoral policies, and coordinate anti-poverty activities. It is complemented by the child MPI, which has the same objectives for children. While this data was collected before the Covid-19 pandemic, the next wave of data will show how the pandemic impacted the poor.”

The report added that in future, the national and child MPIs will be used to monitor trends – a function they can effectively achieve, because if any deprivation of any poor person is reduced, MPI will decrease.