Share of the population in multidimensional poverty
What you should know about this indicator
- Being MPI poor means that a person is deprived in a third or more of ten indicators, grouped into three dimensions: health (using two indicators: nutrition, child mortality), education (using two indicators: years of schooling, school attendance) and living standards (using five indicators: cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets).
- Households are assessed as being deprived in a given indicator if they do not meet a certain threshold for that indicator. For instance, a household is deprived in the Years of schooling indicator if no household member has completed six years of schooling. A person is considered deprived in the Cooking fuel indicator if they cook using solid fuel, such as dung, agricultural crops, wood, charcoal, or coal. The thresholds for each indicator are published by OPHI in their methodological notes.
- The individual indicators are not weighted equally: When adding up the number of indicators in which a person is deprived, some count for more than others. Health and education indicators are given a weight of 1/6, while the indicators within the living standards dimension are given a weight of 1/18. This means that the three dimensions – health, education and living standards – have an equal weight in the total of one-third each.
- If the household survey data being used is missing any of the 10 indicators, that indicator is dropped from the calculation. The weights are then adjusted so that each dimension continues to be given a weight of one-third. MPI poverty estimates are only calculated if at least one indicator in health and education dimensions is available, and if up to four indicators in the living standards dimension are available.
- This variable is a harmonized over time (HOT) estimate. This harmonization seeks to make two or more MPI estimations comparable by aligning the indicator definitions in each survey. Look for the current margin estimate (CME) to see the most recent survey data.
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Share of the population in multidimensional poverty”, part of the following publication: Joe Hasell, Max Roser, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Pablo Arriagada (2022) - “Poverty”. Data adapted from Alkire, Kanagaratnam and Suppa. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-multidimensionally-poor-hot [online resource]
How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
Alkire, Kanagaratnam and Suppa (2024) - The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2024 – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Full citation
Alkire, Kanagaratnam and Suppa (2024) - The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2024 – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Share of the population in multidimensional poverty – National, Harmonized over time” [dataset]. Alkire, Kanagaratnam and Suppa, “Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2024” [original data]. Retrieved November 9, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-multidimensionally-poor-hot