Measurement of Multidimensional Child Poverty

Abstract

Multidimensional child poverty defines children who experience a state of poverty that is more complex than that defined by a unidimensional measure of poverty, but encompasses child material needs and human rights, in a holistic way. The definition of child poverty agreed by the UN General Assembly was used by Gordon, Townsend, and their colleagues from the University of Bristol for their study on child poverty in the developing world (Gordon et al. 2003). It gives full weight to material deprivation as the main element of child poverty, stating that children living in poverty are deprived in multiple domains of their lives (i.e., nutrition, water and sanitation, education, shelter, and protection among others) and that the lack of goods and access to services can represent a severe threat for their growth and development (United Nations General Assembly 2007). Multidimensional child poverty encompasses the various deprivations experienced by children in their daily lives. Standard, monetary, measures of poverty don't account for lack of access to services, immaterial needs and goods that do not have functioning markets, such as education, health, access to clean water, safety, and so on. They also don't account for intrahousehold distribution and inequalities. Children lack equal decision power within the household, and many of the goods and services they need to flourish cannot be translated into monetary equivalent. The aim of measuring multidimensional poverty is to assess children's welfare in a way that goes beyond income.

Children's dimensions of poverty: Qualitative studies in urban China

“…With respect to the measures of multidimensional child poverty discussed earlier, listening to the children in the Hangzhou and Beijing schools, suggests a distinct preference for the dimensionality suggested by the MODA approach to measuring child poverty rather than the narrower MPI as currently specified (Carraro & Ferrone, 2020;De Neubourg et al, 2013;Vaz et al, 2019a). It captures the same concern with negligence, violence, work, and social relationships that the children in Hangzhou and Beijing identified and, if not directly, the shame, lack of confidence and agency that also emerged as important.…”

“…An alternative approach, Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA), pioneered by UNICEF, employs child-relevant indicators and, reflecting child development, has two specifications: one for infants aged 0 to 4; and one for children and youth aged 5 to 17 (Carraro & Ferrone, 2020;De Neubourg et al, 2013). MODA embraces more dimensions ( 14) than the MPI and reaches beyond material deprivations to embrace violence and negligence, child labour, access to information, leisure, and social relationships.…”

How effective are cash transfers in mitigating shocks for vulnerable children? Evidence on the impact of the Lesotho CGP on multiple deprivation

“…There is now an extensive literature on multidimensional child poverty, starting from the pioneer study of Gordon et al (2003), which paved the way to country-level studies of child poverty (Roelen et al, 2010;Chzhen et al, 2016;Chzhen and Ferrone, 2017;Lekobane and Roelen, 2020) and the development of a series of approaches to measure multidimensional child poverty (Carraro and Ferrone, 2020) including the two dominant ones, ie., UNICEF's Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis (MODA) (de Neubourg et al, 2012) and the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) (Alkire and Foster, 2011). The last ten years have seen an ongoing debate on opportunities and challenges of the different methods (Hjelm et al, 2016;Carraro and Chzhen, 2019).…”