Measuring intrahousehold relationships between gendered and individual disadvantages among multidimensionally poor people across the developing world

The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), together with UNDP's Human Development Report Office, has been publishing data on multidimensional poverty for over 100 developing countries and 6.1 billion people since 2010. The well-established global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) that captures acute forms of poverty using 10 indicators covering health, education and living standards.

Importantly, the index establishes not only the level of poverty across the world, but sheds light on both the extent of hardship experienced by the poor (intensity of poverty), and shows clearly the indicator composition of poverty, giving actionable information to policymakers. The MPI is disaggregated by age groups, urban/rural areas, and subnational regions to shed light on inequalities within countries and ensure that the most vulnerable are not being left behind.

While the global MPI provides crucial information on poverty at the household level. Analysis on gender and intrahousehold inequalities has been limited despite the widespread recognition that these are important factors in understanding differences in poverty. The novelty of the proposed project is to apply a new methodology that will analyse gendered inequalities and intrahousehold inequalities in multidimensional poverty.

Using nationally representative survey data underlining the global MPI, this project will shed a light on the prevalence of gender-based differences within households, with a focus on health and educational outcomes. The project will ask whether women and girls are more deprived than men and boys in terms of nutrition, school attendance for children, and completed years of schooling, and how this differs among multidimensionally poor and non-poor households.

This study will be the first to measure the direct relationship between women's education and child undernutrition and school attendance among multidimensionally poor households in a critical mass of countries at a global scale. Many past studies use modelling techniques to analyse the strength of association between women's education and household outcomes, however they fall short of the direct measurement of the phenomena.

Using approximately 10 million observations and data from 110 countries, our work will provide a pioneering new look at intrahousehold and gendered differences across the developing world. Our study will also go a step further to analyse whether gendered inequalities within households differ according to the poverty status of the household.

This project will also be the first to conduct trends analysis of intrahousehold and gendered differences in multidimensional poverty over multiple time periods. Analysing changes in poverty over time is crucial to ensure sustainable and equitable development and track progress on goals. Importantly, we need to know whether intrahousehold and gendered disparities reduce or increase and this might differ between poor and non-poor households.

The results will provide comprehensive new understanding of how multidimensional poverty and gender are interlinked across the developing world and show disparities across regions and countries. This will enable more targeted interventions from national policymakers and development practitioners and contribute an understanding of the gendered aspects of poverty alleviation.

The findings of the study will provide important information for national governments, international agencies and academia on how to reduce poverty more effectively and efficiently, taking into account differences by gender. The analysis techniques developed will serve as the basis for applications in national measures of multidimensional poverty to explore country-specific understandings of gendered inequalities.