Why are the life chances of some children so much worse than others? Why does your passport dictate so much from before you are born – the ‘lottery of life’?
Why is life so much better, for example, if you are among the few born in the northernmost region of Sudan, as opposed to the east, west, south or centre excluding Khartoum? Why do indigenous peoples all around the world have so much lower a life expectancy than other citizens – from 13 years lower in Guatemala and seven in Canada, to 20 years lower in Nepal and Australia? Why are members of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in India twice as likely to live in income poverty?
Why do children with disabilities make up a third of those who don’t go to school, so that the global literacy rate for all those with disability may be only 3% – and 1% for women with disabilities? Why, indeed, are two thirds of the world’s illiterate adults women, and why has this failed to change over decades?
Turning from dimensions of inequality to policy measures, why does it seem to damage your chances to be born in a lower-tax US state?
Finally, why is that we lack even the data to see, never mind to understand, some of the limitations on the lives of far too many children born today? Being counted matters. From voting to accessing health care, it’s generally true that if your name isn’t down, you’re not coming in. And where policymakers are unaware of people, their needs are unlikely to be met.
Where people are uncounted it tends to reflect and compound a lack of power – whether because social service provision is based on census returns, for example, or because knowledge of outcomes is needed to drive policy responses, or because political power is derived from existence in official documents.
This blog is intended to address the development debates around these problems and their causes, and the state of knowledge about policy responses, recognising that this is a time of some flux. Perceptions of what matters for development are changing, the development agenda is changing, and the geography of poverty and inequality is changing.
To be clear, this is not a blog about what ‘we’ can do to help some helpless ‘them’. Nor is it a Save the Children blog exactly – these are my thoughts, or at least in some broad sense this is all my fault, and the usual disclaimer applies (with thanks to the wonderful precedent set by Duncan Green at Oxfam).
The development narrative no longer solely focuses on reducing extreme income poverty, to be addressed primarily by financial flows from rich countries to poor ones.
Four main changes have occurred, or are occurring. First, the location of poverty has shifted: rather than ‘poor people in poor countries’, the majority of people in extreme income poverty now live in countries designated by the World Bank as middle income. (Do we count this poverty as the same, better or worse, than that in low income countries?)
Second, the underlying understanding of poverty has shifted: while extreme income poverty continues to be used as a form of shorthand, and reflects the major data effort, poverty is now widely understood as multi-dimensional, covering many aspects of people’s power to enjoy a good life, and to determine their own future. (When will data catch up, to be able to count in these multiple dimensions?)
Third, there is increasing recognition of the centrality of national level policy decisions and of underlying structures in delivering development. Whether we look at corruption, tax dodging and the massive (uncounted) illicit financial outflows they create, or broader questions of a lack of transparency and political accountability, or the central importance of economic activity through trade and investment (á la David Cameron’s golden thread), or the challenges of financial regulation, it is clear that while aid is vital it is far from the whole puzzle.
Fourth, the urgency of sustainability has become uncontroversial. In these austere times the political emphasis on the constraints posed by planetary boundaries may not feel as powerful, but no-one seriously disputes their importance any more (although our ability to measure them all remains less than perfect).
Among other things, I hope this blog will help to examine the implications of these changes, and to consider how they will play out over the course of the next few years – not least in the process to identify a post-2015 successor framework to the Millennium Development Goals.
We can already be fairly clear about some of the implications. Inequality will continue its move from being a ‘political’ issue, to one which is treated primarily technically and in the centre ground – while remaining contentious for some. Natural resource constraints will become ubiquitous in discussions of development approach over any but the shortest time horizon.
The complexity of poverty will provide all sorts of challenges, and the tendency to use simpler but weaker measures will persist. At the same time though, the pressure will build to generate more and higher-quality data to understand this complexity and have policy respond to it. In combination with this, the pressure will build from donors and from civil society for greater transparency of governments and of the private sector. The ‘big data’ agenda seems set fair for the next few years at least, and there are opportunities for great innovation and progress here.
If a dimension of development, or a given community, is not being counted, progress is almost inevitably hamstrung. The better we understand the distribution of multi-dimensional poverty, and what drives it, the better we can prevent the harm inequality does to individuals, to communities and to societies. I hope this blog can become a space where knowledge and understanding are shared, tested, developed…
Great first post and looking forward to your thoughts on all topics mentioned. From my years in India, I saw the main problem you describe…it was difficult to advocate for Dalits (300 million “untouchables”) due to a lack of disaggregated data e.g. on Dalit women. In other cases e.g. Dalit Muslims/Christians (approx. 109 million), there was simply no data/counting to be found. Again, thanks for tackling this subject!
Thanks Ben. Worth noting too that India has much better data than on its horizontal inequalities than a lot of places.
I guess you know the Institute of Dalit Studies? E.g. interesting briefing using nutrition survey data here: http://www.phfi.org/images/pdf/Policy_Note_Vol5_5.pdf
Would very much agree on this issue of data and being uncounted – a point worth making time and time again.
However on the issue on the location of poverty what is your response to the new research from ODI Horizons 2025: creative destruction in the aid industry: “We project that, by 2025, the locus of global poverty will overwhelmingly be in fragile, mainly low-income and African, states, contrary to current policy preoccupations with the transitory phenomenon of poverty concentration in middle-income countries.” http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/docs/7723.pdf
It’s a fair point, Kerry. The literature on predicting poverty location is interesting (Chandy and Gertz too), but you do worry a bit about the possibly heroic nature of the assumptions. Kharas notes three particular issues around the solidity of underlying survey data and PPP conversions, for example; all of which could make you worry about what we know about poverty today, before then projecting forward with all the additional assumptions that entails. Would it be unfair to think the main results could be cast as “assume decent growth except in states that are not growing just now”, leaving the currently ‘fragile’ as the location of poverty in the future? Not necessarily unreasonable assumptions, to be fair, but if we’d assumed similar twenty years ago (say) I’m not sure we’d have projected the emergence of the new bottom billion…
Hi Alex
great news. Just tweeted the link and will add to the FP2P blogroll. Are we in competition or are you up for some joint posts? Or both? Good luck with navigating sign off, NGO self censorship, stroppy big cheeses and all the other pitfalls of our happy sector,
Duncan
Thanks Duncan. Joint posts sound infinitely preferable to competition!
(I’m just going to ignore all the words after ‘navigating’, unless you want to share some secrets?)
hallo Alex,
looking forward to your ideas on this, i am also driven to understand and work for solutions to these inequalities you describe. and the more visible and concrete they become the less acceptable it is to let these inequalities endure
ps the link to the picture in your post in broken,
Emer
Thanks Emer, hope that’s fixed now.
Pingback: Offshore trillions and uncounted inequality | Uncounted
Welcome to the blogosphere! There’s one huge determinant of poverty that you haven’t mentioned and, indeed, that NGOs generally fail to address: class. In almost every community, in almost every demographic, in almost every location that you mention, there are rich and poor, exploiters and exploited. Looking forward to you and Save the Children addressing that one and suggesting solutions, or, more entertainingly, explaining why not!
Thanks, Owen. That’s a fair point, in terms of the word ‘class’ being absent, but not in terms of the idea – the entire piece, and indeed this entire blog, is devoted to the reasons for people being excluded, so class is never far away. I tend to disagree with those who see class as being dealt with in some sense through vertical inequality, but rather go along with Frances Stewart in seeing class as also being among the horizontal inequalities. (Frances explores the role of class in a few places in her original paper setting out the need to consider horizontal inequalities in development, which is here: http://www3.qeh.ox.ac.uk/RePEc/qeh/qehwps/qehwps81.pdf).
On whether NGOs in general fail to address class, I’m not sure. To the extent that you can generalise, I suppose the development NGOs would tend to look at global income and wealth distribution and see more clearly the between-country differences, as opposed to the within-country ones (see e.g. Branco Milanovic on the relative scale of these) – so I guess that supports your point, although I’m not sure it should be criticised.
Looking at within-country inequality, I hope this piece gave a flavour of the type of horizontal inequalities that may mean that class is often not the major dimension of injustice; perhaps particularly in countries at lower average income levels? But rather than seeing this as an alternative or even a challenge to understanding class dynamics, it may be more useful to view class as one of a number of horizontal inequalities in which the dynamics may have important similarities.
Interested to know your thoughts on this.
Dear Alex
What an interesting notion “uncounted”. I actually thought you were going to write about children gone missing in the UK, especially from foster care!
But as I am watching the most heinous of all crimes ‘child snatching’ aka ‘state kidnapping’, I can give you an ‘interesting’ link from Haringey Council: they find it would cost too much money to ‘count’ how many children they returned to their parents, after having taken them away from them… See http://bit.ly/P0W2xW for their answer.
For the whole drama, see http://www.punishmentwithoutcrime.wordpress.com
It would be lovely if you could find some new helpful perspectives. I feel worn out and at the end of my tether – up against SUCH deviousness, sanctioned by judges, Police and everybody necessary, while the Education Select Committee and the responsible Minister think that everything is hunky, dory…
Sighingly yours,
Sabine
http://victims-unite.net
Hi Alex,
Interesting blog! Love to read more of your thoughts! I would say that your fourth change (insight) should be setting the stage. If we want to move towards a sustainable society, we NEED to reduce poverty. As poor people are fully occcupied with day to day survival and have limited means to invest in longer terms, they are not inclined to make long term, sustainable choices.
The changing location of poverty is indeed a major change driver in the development debate. Not only the fact that most poor live in Middle Income Countries (that often do not want to receive Official Development Aid (ODA), like India), but also the change from rural poor to urban poor. In the coming decades, (multi dimensional) poverty will be primarily located in cities.
I believe that your concept of development delivering structures has a lot of room for innovations. To only in countering the leakages (corruption illicit outflows), but also in finding new channels for delivery. For example levering private sector investments to be more inclusive and sustainable (see for example http://www.idhsustainabletrade.com). In the 60s/70s, ODA amounted to 80% of the income of many African countries. Nowadays it’s more towards 12%, the rest being private capital like FDI and remittances.
Finally I would like to add a fith major change. The emergence of players like Brasil and China in the development sphere. There’s much debate about the good and bad their investments in Africa, but it’s happening and a large scale (China is a bigger investor in Africa than the World Bank) and will increase further. We have to work with this trend if we want to bring the development narrative up to date!
Looking forward to the discussion and your ideas!
Paul
@Paul_Schoen
Thanks Paul. I absolutely agree on the changing nature of inflows to countries at different income levels being an important consideration. What the illicit flow discussion focuses the mind on is that not all inflows are equal. For example, researchers haven’t turned up evidence of systematic economic growth benefits of FDI to lower-income countries, despite the strength of the theoretical basis. I hope that we’ll increasingly see analysis that focuses on the differences in types of FDI (and other inflows), and aims to build a more nuanced understanding of what contributes to various outcomes. UNCTAD’s 2012 World Investment Report takes some interesting steps in differentiation of FDI with its FDI Contribution Index – see http://www.unctad-docs.org/files/UNCTAD-WIR2012-Full-en.pdf – and my chapter in the World Bank’s Draining Development points to some of the differences we might see according to where investments are made from: http://issuu.com/world.bank.publications/docs/9780821388693