Sri Lanka has developed its first official national Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) in collaboration with UNICEF, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), and the European Union. The index provides a comprehensive picture of poverty by identifying the multiple ways in which poverty manifests itself for people, beyond just monetary deprivations. The MPI policy tool will provide information to accelerate poverty reduction in different sectors with limited resources, by informing high impact budget allocations to social sectors, focused interventions, policy design and coordination, and monitoring.
The country’s first official national MPI was developed in 2021 using data from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2019 by the Department of Census and Statistics (DCS), in collaboration with various stakeholders and the support of UNICEF, OPHI and the European Union.
To further support child-focused policies, an individual child MPI for children aged 0-4 was crafted, which includes the same indicators as the national MPI, and two pivotally important child deprivations in Sri Lanka: under-nutrition and early childhood development. The child MPI pioneers in being the first official measure of child poverty that links directly and precisely with the national MPI.
The Sri Lankan MPI is an official permanent statistic of multidimensional poverty that will be updated and published regularly, reported as SDG indicator 1.2.2 (“Proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions”), and used to complement the monetary poverty measure. The MPI can be disaggregated by age, sex, or location, providing detailed insights into how to focus policy interventions.
Poverty has many faces and especially the experience of deprivations during childhood, such as in nutrition and cognitive development, can last a lifetime. The Sri Lankan MPI creates a comprehensive picture of poverty, revealing who the poor people are and how they are poor by focusing on a set of interlinked deprivations that poor people experience. By providing such information, the MPI will support Sri Lanka’s commitment to “End poverty in all its forms everywhere”, as embraced in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1.