Cabo Verde's journey towards poverty reduction has been nothing short of impressive, with monetary poverty rates falling substantially since the early 2000s. The national poverty headcount fell from 56.8 percent in 2001 to 35.2 percent in 2015. This successful trend is expected to continue, with poverty projected to have reached 28.1 percent in 2022, after temporarily increasing to 31.3 percent in 2020 because of the pandemic.
However, traditional measures of monetary poverty may fail to fully capture the everyday deprivations faced by Cabo Verdeans. Several components necessary to live a life of dignity are not exclusively traded in markets, such as access to basic infrastructure, environmental quality, and the availability of education and health care (Chakravarty and Lugo 2016). As a result, two households with the same consumption level might experience different living standards if they differ in their access to the public sewerage system or a nearby school (World Bank 2018). This has motivated the measurement of non-monetary poverty by developing countries and at a global scale (e.g., Multidimensional Poverty Measure or Global Multidimensional Poverty Index).
In this context, the national statistics office of Cabo Verde and the World Bank have been working in a proposal for a national Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for Cabo Verde. This initiative is the culmination of a multi-phase process involving a diverse array of national and international institutions, including the United Nations Development Programme, and the country’s ministries of Education, and Family and Social Development. These partners have engaged in both normative and empirical discussions to shape the national MPI. While the current indicator relies on the 2015 household survey, the MPI will be updated using the 2023 household survey once it becomes available later this year.
The successful adoption of a national MPI will ease the articulation of social policies across sectors and over time. In addition, a tailored MPI will enable Cabo Verde’s government to set a more ambitious and locally relevant development agenda than relying on off-the-shelf international measures.
What does the multidimensional approach reveal about poverty in Cabo Verde
About 17.2 percent of the population in Cabo Verde was multidimensionally poor in 2015. The deprivations faced by Cabo Verdeans were concentrated in housing conditions, adult education, and nutrition (Figure 1). Roughly a third of the population did not have access to proper sanitation or improved cooking fuel in 2015, and over a quarter of the population lived in overly crowded dwellings. In addition, about a third of the population lived in a household where none of the adults have completed 8 years of education or more. Finally, almost a quarter of Cabo Verdeans in 2015 lived in a household with at least one person who was undernourished.
Figure 1. National MPI for Cabo Verde: Deprivation rates, 2015
Multidimensional deprivations and monetary poverty are linked (Figure 2). For instance, while 32.8 percent of individuals who were not deprived from attending school lived below the national poverty line; but, among those living in households where at least one child was not attending school the poverty rate was 60.5 percent. We observe a similar pattern for deprivations related to health and living conditions. In contrast, obesity is the only deprivation that was not correlated with monetary poverty.
Figure 2. Monetary Poverty headcount, by non-monetary deprivations
Setting policy priorities
Looking at the relationship between monetary and multidimensional poverty can tell us which policies to emphasize. Understanding these multidimensional aspects of poverty is crucial for Cabo Verde as it continues to develop policies and programs to improve the lives of its citizens. By looking at the full picture of what it means to live in poverty, the nation can tailor its approach to meet the specific needs of its people, ensuring that every Cabo Verdean can enjoy a dignified and prosperous life.
The study shows that an individual living in a household without electricity or adequate sanitation was between 8 and 10 percentage points more likely to be monetarily poor than their non-deprived counterpart. This finding is robust to controlling for different geographical and household characteristics, suggesting that access to physical infrastructure, a characteristic that does not only depend on the purchasing power of the household, is still strongly related to households’ income-generating capacity.
A substantial share of individuals deprived of either health or education are also deprived of other dimensions. According to Figure 3, at the national level, four out of five people experiencing at least one deprivation in health also experienced deprivation in another dimension such as education, living conditions, or both. This figure was even higher, about nine in ten people, for the population experiencing at least one deprivation in education. The overlapping nature between health and education suggests double gains from implementing coordinated policies that address the causes behind the level of deprivation in these dimensions.
Figure 3. Overlap across deprivations, by area – Cabo Verde, 2015
What comes next?
The MPI is more than a statistical exercise; it represents a commitment to an integrated social policymaking approach that resonates across institutions and through time. It empowers Cabo Verde to craft a development agenda that is ambitious and attuned to the local context and challenges, transcending the limitations of international indicators.
The natural next step is to measure the progress of Cabo Verde through the lens of the MPI using the new household survey from 2023 (expected to be released later this year), but more importantly, this proposal should trigger a deeper conversation between different government ministries on how to design an institutional environment that links the MPI as part of the core metric to evaluate the performance of public policies. This will ensure that social policy builds a future where every Cabo Verdean can thrive, with their needs and aspirations at the heart of development strategies.
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