Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021: Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste and gender

This report was released on October 7, 2021, by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), an economic research and policy centre at University of Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the latest edition of the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index report, released annually by OPHI since 2010. In the report, ‘multidimensional poverty’ includes income and other indicators such as poor health, lack of education and poor living standards. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) calculates and presents data on multidimensional poverty among 109 developing nations (26 low-income countries, 80 middle-income countries and three high-income countries) covering 5.9 billion people. It bases its study on 10 indicators across three dimensions of poverty: health, education, and standard of living. This report, for the first time, also classifies data by ethnicity or race (in 40 countries), caste (in India) and gender of the head of the household (in 108 countries).The report is divided into two parts, each of them containing multiple sections. The first part ‘Building forward with equity: Where are we now?’ consists of three sections: The 2021 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (Section 1); How did poverty change during the two decades before the COVID-19 pandemic? (Section 2); and COVID-19 and multidimensional poverty around the world (Section 3). The second part ‘Multidimensional poverty, ethnicity, caste and gender: Revealing disparities’ contains two sections: Multidimensional poverty and ethnicity, race and caste (Section 1); and Multidimensional poverty through a gendered and intrahousehold lens (Section 2).