Tracking the progress of the poorest people

The issue

Inequality is increasingly being seen as a critical issue to be addressed globally. The gap between the incomes of the poorest 20% of the population and everyone else is widening – both globally and in most countries. International commitments made in 2015 for Agenda 2030 included the twin goals under SDG 1 and SDG 10 of ending poverty in all its forms everywhere and reducing inequality by achieving faster than average progress for the poorest people.

There is also clear recognition of the need to radically improve data and evidence on poverty to help ensure that the poorest are truly included in progress and no one is left behind.

The purpose of our work

It is a key priority for Development Initiatives (DI) to encourage countries to improve how they track the progress of the poorest people in their populations to ensure no one is left behind. To realise this, we are working to:

• strengthen global and national commitments to deliver the progressive and universal agenda set in 2015;
• focus attention at the global and national level on the imperative of reaching the poorest 20% of populations;
• explain what ‘leave no one behind’ means in practical terms for politicians, business, aid agencies, CSOs and citizens – highlighting policies and actions needed to target and deliver for the poorest people globally, nationally and locally;
• provide data and analysis that can both reinforce commitments to leave no one behind and offer practical support to organisations operationalising this principle;
• insist on the importance of measuring progress to reinforce accountability for delivering on Agenda 2030 – looking specifically at whether the income gap between the poorest 20% of people and everyone else is starting to narrow, but also beyond income, across other important dimensions ranging from birth registration to nutrition outcomes;
• place particular focus on the availability, quality and use of data – helping people access and use the increasing data which is becoming available to hardwire key metrics into the international policy dialogue, as well as highlighting the trajectories needed to turn political commitments into delivery.

Our impact

In 2018, DI began work on a new project with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the government of Benin to analyse the poorest 20% of people in their countries and drive better data on these populations. By tracking such data, we can tell if the gap between the poorest 20% and the rest of a population is narrowing or widening – whether that’s at the national level (the national P20) or the global level (the global P20). The P20 approach can be applied to track inequality globally and in every country, and is a universal approach that matches the universal ambition of Agenda 2030.

As part of this project, DI has worked with in-country stakeholders in Benin to gather analysis and produce a report that applies this concept to Benin in an effort to better understand the status of the national P20 and what current trends can tell us about people at risk of being left behind. DI further supported the government of Benin by contributing to the preparation of the country’s voluntary national review of progress against the SDGs, which was presented to the UN in 2018.

Initial lessons, challenges and experiences from analysis of the national P20 in both Benin and Switzerland were presented at a side event at the High-level Political Forum in July 2018. Government representatives from both countries joined DI’s experts to share information and answer queries.

Later in the year, Switzerland’s collaboration with Benin to apply the P20 approach in both countries was used as a case study of innovative development cooperation in the OECD’s Development Cooperation Report.

So that any stakeholder from anywhere in the world can get an initial idea about what progress is being made and where action is likely to be needed, we have also produced top-line analysis that provides a snapshot of how the P20 are doing in every country in the world.

Future plans

Going forward, DI will conduct in-depth work with other countries to support them as they develop new strategies to deliver on the commitment to leave no one behind. We will also continue to produce analysis that informs global efforts to target the poorest people in the world, and drive action to improve the data and evidence necessary to ensure no one is missed. We will be increasing the use of data from both official and non-official sources to provide a richer and more accurate assessment of progress – looking to CSOs and citizen-generated data to take advantage of a wide range of valuable data. Accompanying these efforts, we will capture the voice of citizens and their lived experiences to bring this data to life – sharing compelling stories that demonstrate the reality of what the data is telling us and the case for change.