Tracking the progress of the poorest people

The issue

In 2021, an estimated 698 million people, 9% of the global population, were living in extreme poverty – that is, on less than US$1.90 a day. Extreme poverty is increasingly concentrated in fragile and conflict-affected countries, with those in sub-Saharan Africa experiencing especially high rates of chronic poverty.

Billions more live in poverty when it is measured with a higher income threshold, a more appropriate measure of poverty in higher income countries with higher costs associated with achieving a basic standard of living. Multidimensional poverty indices that measure a range of deprivations that people face, beyond economic resources, similarly show higher levels of global poverty than the extreme poverty figure. By these measures, the majority of people living in poverty live in middle-income countries with large populations and high rates of inequality.

Inequality and poverty are inextricably linked. The central transformative pledge of Agenda 2030 to leave no one behind requires us to address discrimination and the root causes of inequality in order to tackle poverty in all its forms, across all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is increasingly clear that to eradicate poverty, development practitioners must tackle inequality too.

The purpose of our work

A key priority for Development Initiatives (DI) is to work with partners to improve, gather and navigate analysis-ready data, and provide decision-ready analysis, to support action to reduce poverty and inequality, and increase resilience so that no one is left behind. To realise this, we are working to:

• Conduct data landscaping to identify and assess available data sources to enable analyses of poverty, inequality and resilience, as well as making recommendations to strengthen data ecosystems
• Conduct decision-ready analysis that identifies who is left behind, to inform the targeting and design of policies to more effectively reduce poverty and inequality and increase resilience
• Analyse the impact of existing policies, programmes and budget on inequality and the outcomes of those living in greatest poverty.

Our impact

In 2018, DI began work on a project with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the government of Benin to drive better data on the poorest 20% of people in the country. This analysis found that the gap between the poorest 20% and the rest of the population was widening. DI worked with stakeholders in Benin to gather data and produced a series of reports in order to better understand the risk of people being left behind. Our report, The P20 in Benin: From consultation to consensus, provided recommendations for action that could help reduce poverty and inequality over time. These recommendations were developed in consultation with a range of stakeholders and included the digitisation of civil registry systems and development of the system for social safety nets.

DI further supported the government of Benin by contributing to the preparation of its voluntary national review of progress towards the SDGs, which was presented to the UN in 2018.

Later that year, Switzerland’s partnership with Benin was used as a case study of innovative best practice in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s Development Cooperation Report.

Future plans

Going forward, DI will support partners to use data and evidence to deliver on the commitment to leave no one behind. We will continue to produce analysis that informs global efforts to improve the outcomes of people living in the greatest poverty, and drive action to improve the data and evidence necessary to achieve this.

Our Poverty and Inequality programme’s unique approach:

• Recognises the importance of drawing on official, unofficial, qualitative and quantitative data to provide a more accurate, timely and balanced assessment of poverty and inequality
• Supports the use of community generated data in particular to bring the voice and lived experiences of communities into policy making spaces
• Provides a considered approach to data privacy and security risks, particularly when generating, storing and sharing detailed and disaggregated data about people and their lives
• Understands poverty as multidimensional and context-specific, taking a locally grounded approach to all our in-country work through a long-term presence in East Africa and partnerships in other regions
• Recognises the importance of horizontal inequalities, which describe distribution between groups or communities, in understanding the root cause of poverty and the intersectionality of inequality
• Takes our findings to international fora and disseminates them to a global audience to inform international dialogue.