Application of Expanded Alkire and Foster Multidimensional Poverty Index to Nigeria

Abstract

An improved Alkire and Foster Multidimensional Poverty Index (MDPI) with 20 indicators clustered into seven dimensions, namely, Social Security, Water and Sanitation, Living Standard, Employment and Income, Health, Nutrition, and Education was developed and implemented with ‘mdpi function’ deployed in R Programming Language. The function computes MDPI along with useful associated measures at sub-national or context-specific levels. It was applied to data collected from 1614 respondents from 13 selected Nigerian states and the results compare favourably with existing studies. From the results obtained, the national MDPI is 0.418 but computing MDPI at National, sub-national or context-specific levels does not always give the same trend. Also, the results further reveal that states in Northern Nigeria (0.420) are more multidimensionally deprived in most of the dimensions although there are instances where states in the South (0.415) also show severe deprivation despite their level of development. In line with the findings, it is recommended that UNDP should implement this new MDPI strategy to ensure that every sector of the society is covered by development interventions. The interventions should be region and context-specific, addressing the North’s educational and employment deprivation and the South’s urban living and social protection deficiencies as well as sex, gender and religious disparities in deprivation.