NEW YORK / OXFORD, UK, Sep 18 (IPS) – Political fragmentation, the climate emergency, organized crime, migration, and low economic growth are currently the subject of public debate in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and rightly so. However, there is a major structural challenge to human development and democracy itself, as well as inequality, at the root of these problems: poverty.
Today, 181 million people, 29% of the region’s population, live in financial poverty, and 33 million suffer from extreme poverty of various kinds (considering only countries with available data). Progress towards a successful and sustainable LAC requires bringing poverty in all its forms and dimensions back into the public debate and addressing new responses through public policy.
Over the past decades, the region has significantly reduced poverty by taking advantage of economic growth driven by asset growth and the introduction of new public policies aimed at solving this problem, such as conditional cash transfers—programs where cash is given to poor families in exchange. to invest certain funds in the development of people, such as ensuring school attendance or participating in vaccination campaigns-.
However, this trend began to reverse two years before the epidemic.
Reviving the poverty reduction agenda requires re-invigorating this new energy and political will. We’ve done it in the past, we have to do it again, and it’s possible. Brazil’s recent proposal to the G20 to promote the Global Alliance to Fight Hunger and Poverty is an excellent step in this direction.
To achieve this, we will need to better understand and measure the multiple forms and dimensions of poverty, ensure effective coordination of institutions for policy design and implementation, and refine the targeting and allocation of resources through new planning tools. Given the context of low economic growth and limited fiscal space, efficiency is key to accelerating critical success.
Ensuring that poor people have the skills and opportunities to live the lives they want requires tools that capture their realities and experiences, including the many deprivations that affect them in various aspects of well-being and go beyond a lack of income.
Lack of access to education, water, or health, among others, is a major disadvantage that may or may not be related to having money—a person may have enough income to not be considered poor but not have access to health care because it does not exist. in a hospital near his community.
The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), launched by UNDP and OPHI in 2010, combines the measurement and analysis of extreme poverty with information about the situation of people in many social and economic sectors.
The MPI has been accepted by countries around the world as an official poverty measure, which is compatible with income-based measures and focuses on the priorities of each country, turning them into effective public policy tools that allow a precise identification of who and where the poor are, and how they vary by age, gender, location, and ethnicity.
Latin America has been a pioneer in adopting national MPIs, with 12 countries and two major cities—Mexico City and Bogotá—and it can also be an indicator of poverty reduction. The success of conditional cash transfers in the past meant a huge jump in the use of cash poverty data.
It is time to replicate this success by creating new revolutionary policies that have the same effect on the use of multidimensional data, taking advantage of the planning, policy expression, and monitoring opportunities provided by the rich knowledge gained from the complementary use of both measures.
In Honduras, for example, multidimensional data was used to better identify the population most at risk due to COVID-19 and to more accurately target capital bases.
On the other hand, a clear articulation between other national policies and poverty reduction objectives will also be important to achieve maximum impact. Policies such as those related to productivity, energy, or climate change are often defined in a sectoral manner despite their potential to accelerate poverty reduction.
These links need to be legitimized. It is also important to invite actors outside the public sector to include these analyzes and measures to accelerate poverty reduction as part of their development strategies. For example, the association of Colombian natural gas producers (Naturgas) created an index of strategic municipalities.
This clearly shows the importance of equity in poverty-related diversity alongside business diversity that is often used by private companies in their decision-making processes. This index creates incentives to invest in areas with high poverty while respecting the environmental benefits of these companies.
If we want to return to the path of ending poverty in all its stages, we must return poverty and inequality to the social system, encouraging spaces for dialogue, cooperation, and consensus about new and changing social policies that allow us to move forward. egalitarian and inclusive societies.
Only in this way will we be on the way to achieving sustainable development in LAC. Let’s not wait any longer and take the step we need in the establishment of society for the welfare and development of people who leave no one behind.
Michelle Muschett he is the Director, Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP); Sabina Alkire is the Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford.
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