Multidimensional Poverty – Reevaluating Past Assumptions…

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education the question was asked: What makes someone poor? Among those who study poverty, the answer has long been a lack of money. If your income falls below a certain level, you're poor. The basic assumption is the same: It's what’s in your wallet that matters.

But maybe there's more to it. Maybe poverty is about not having enough food, access to health care, reliable transportation, adequate sanitation, food, shelter, and a dozen other things that make life bearable. This multidimensional approach has been getting a lot of attention lately. It makes you wonder if the way we've been measuring poverty for decades has been, if not wrong, then maybe incomplete.

Theoretically, it is easy to see that poverty could be about more than income, but actually trying to measure those other factors… Well, it can’t be easy. Calculat­ing income-based poverty is pretty straightforward, if you make X amount and have Y people in your family you are either poor or not (see chart above)… but trying to quantify a wide range of data about well-being is considerably more complicated and laden with potential difficulties in measuring variables that have long been overlooked.

A multidimensional method will allow us (researchers, economists, and officials) to decide which categories to include in the poverty calculation, how many categories must be deficient to make a person poor, and to also weight certain categories as more important than others. For instance we could decide that food matters more than transportation.

So why redefine what it means to be poor anyway? Isn’t income data enough? Well, no.

For starters you get a more complete and accurate picture of who needs help and what kind of help they need. The Bing Foundation only effects poverty indirectly… we help people go to college and get educated. However, statistics show that those with a college degree (even if it is only an Associate) earn more than those with just a high school diploma. Providing education does not necessarily raise anyone's income, but it should create opportunities to substantially improve quality of life. Traditionally, need-based financial aid is all about income levels… We use income, the family’s previous education, family size, grades, and a myriad of other weighted categories to determine who gets a scholarship.

We focus on schools and districts laden with traditionally underserved student populations (first generation students, minorities, financially needy, etc) for our college preparation and counseling efforts.

Having a way to measure improvement in areas other than income allows a government or an organization to demonstrate how it is helping its citizens, or a critic to show how it's failing to help them. Hopefully we will see success in this new multidimensional approach to poverty and that will translate into more help to get people educated and more lives changed.