The Ministry of Human Development, Social Transformation and Poverty Alleviation wants to find out just serious poverty is in Belize, and how it is affecting the lives of poor Belizeans.
They recognize that their measuring techniques are outdated. So, they are working with non-governmental organizations to come up with a more accurate way to properly determine just how serious the financial struggles are that some citizens face.
Today, the government's technocrats sat down with those NGO's to start discussing what they're calling the Multiple Dimensions of Poverty.
We stopped by at their workshop, and we spoke with one of the analysts from the Ministry about this particular exercise. Here's what he told us:
Mark Antrovus - Social Planner, Ministry of Human Development
"Traditionally, in this country and all around the world, we've looked at poverty in terms of income, how much money do people earn, and what do they spend it on. But, for a number of years, maybe a couple of decades, we've really realized that it's not just income. While that plays a part, there are many dimensions to poverty. And so, what we're trying to do today is come up with a way of measuring those multi-dimensions. So, not just income, but it is access services, education and health, whether you have shelter, access to clean water, even to what you do with your time. So, there's always something called poverty time. And that's - do people have enough time to go and play with their children, to spend leisure and watch a football match. Often, people - in poverty, you just don't have to relax."
"Unfortunately, our last poverty assessment was in 2009. To say what poverty is in Belize right now is very difficult because obviously things change over a period of time. But, what we can say from 2009 and experiences all around the world is that children experience poverty to greater extents that Adults. And that's very simple because often if, you're going to class a household as being poor, there might be one or 2 adults in the household, but there is often 3, 4, and 5 children. So, obviously, the number of children are effected discriminately more by poverty in adults. We also know that rural areas are usually twice as poor as urban areas. So, there is some general trends that we see, but right now we really don't know that poverty looks like, but the good news is that next year, we'll have the next country poverty assessments. And that assessment, we're going to include this multi-dimensional measure."
"The outcome of today will be a work plan, to go from where we are right now, which is just a simple measure of expenditure. So, we don't measure people's income. We ask what do you spend your money on, and then, we work out poverty from that. So, that's the current state of affairs, how do we define what a multi-dimensional measure will be? What dimensions do we include? What indicators should we include, and where do we get that data from. And I hope it starts an approach, where we go out and ask people, go out into society, and instead of us sitting in here, in a nice air conditioned office, we go out and see what is your life like, where are the areas that you think you need to improve, you would like to improve, what are your aspiration. And we reflect that in our measure as well."
The last poverty assessment in Belize was done 8 years ago, in 2009. The Ministry wants to conduct an updated assessment next year.
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