Sustainable Development Goal #1 is to end poverty in all its forms everywhere.
Within SDG #1 are 7 targets, of which this episode will focus on Target 1.2, which is:
By 2030, reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions.
The year 2030 has been set as the deadline for this target, to be met in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals as a whole.
For this particular target, distinct from the previous target 1.1, of eliminating ‘extreme poverty’, we need to understand how this target defines ‘poverty’. As we learned in the previous target, extreme poverty is defined as living under $US1.90 a day, an international poverty line for extreme poverty.
So, what does the more generalised term ‘poverty’ mean in the context of target 1.2?
The term ‘relative poverty’ comes in handy here. Whereby the definition of ‘extreme poverty’ is the same internationally at $1.90, ‘relative poverty’ depends on the cost of living in different countries. Each country has its own individual poverty line, and therefore is also a reflection of the economic inequalities within a country.
Thus, the phrasing of target 1.1, “...according to national definitions,” meaning the threshold each country - both developed and developing - holds for an individual or household to live adequately to meet their basic needs: a minimum standard of living for food, clothing, shelter, health care and toilets.
Whatever its causes, poverty leaves individuals and communities vulnerable to hunger, disease, climate change, slavery and forced prostitution, open defecation, slum conditions in urban residential areas, inequities around access to health care, the freedom to participate in the economy or labour market, overpopulation, outward emigration of highly-educated citizens, corruption, and discrimination based on age, caste, race and sex.
Another aspect of target 1.1 worth exploring is the reference to “poverty in all its dimensions”. Whereas a national poverty line would traditionally be measured by an amount of income or consumption, a multidimensional approach to poverty broadens the definition from solely income or consumption, to include other important facets of development.
Another measure of poverty heavily in use is consumption expenditure equivalent to US$3.20, with data measuring this obtained by household surveys. This consumption measure includes food purchased, as well as food produced by the household itself, particularly pertinent to the least developed countries. Poverty obviously does not end once the $1.90 international extreme poverty line has been crossed.
Yet this meagre difference of a threshold of $3.20 is common to the lower tiers of the middle-income countries. The World Bank forecasts a quarter of a billion people’s fortunes reversed, pushed back under the measure of $3.20 income per day due the COVID-19 pandemic. A quarter of the world’s population, or 1.80 billion people, live under the $3.20 poverty line, in contrast to approximately a tenth living under the extreme poverty line of $1.90. This amount is less than at the adoption of the SDGs in 2015, with 140 million living under $3.20 a day, down from more than half the global population in 1990. The number of people living under $3.20 is comparable now to the amount of people living on $1.90 a day in 1990.
Half of those living under $3.20 live in South Asia, as do a quarter of the extreme poor. This contrasts to sub-Saharan Africa, home to two-thirds of the world’s population living in extreme poverty, and a third under the $3.20 poverty line. East Asia has seen huge progress on eradicating extreme poverty in the past three decades, but as of 2018, 150 million East Asians lived under the $3.20 poverty line.
Quite separate to the severe plights of the low- and middle-income countries is the relative poverty experienced of high-income countries, generally synonymous with members of the OECD. For these countries specifically, the SDG Index has an indicator for poverty rate after taxes and transfers, or the share of the population whose disposable incomes fall below half the median income
The Human Development Index has been published by the UN for the past twenty years, using a formula to assign indexes to countries based on per capita income, life expectancy, and years of schooling.
Such indexes have since been expanded to reflect how the world now recognises development since the UN agenda moved on from international development to further overlapping factors of deprivation encapsulated within sustainable development.
Another important feature of multidimensional poverty measures allows for measures of both the prevalence of poverty, but also the depth of poverty within those proportions.
Another factor of importance in achieving this goal, not reflected in the UN’s official indicators, but proposed by the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network as an indicator, is total fertility rate. The assumption is the more births per woman, the greater the population growth, a trend forecast for those countries still mired in poverty, with strong evidence demonstrating the links between high fertility and high poverty rates, eroding sustainable development efforts furthermore. As well as reflecting living in poverty, high fertility rates can be related to poor access to reproductive health options.
The two official indicators for target 1.2 are reflective of the concepts of poverty lines and multidimensional poverty indices:
Indicator 1.2.1: Proportion of population living below the national poverty line, by sex and age.
Indicator 1.2.2: Proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions.
