Hvordan måler man fattigdom i storbyerne og deres slum?

As researchers and aid agencies struggle to distinguish between chronic poverty and acute vulnerability, IRIN reviewed efforts to measure city dwellers’ poverty and vulnerability in life-threatening scenarios.

More than two-thirds of the world’s urban population lives in low- and middle-income countries where nearly one billion are living in slums, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, according to the World Bank.

As more people pour into cities often ill-equipped to handle the influx, experts are trying to find ways of defining and measuring urban poverty. Their findings influence humanitarian policy and programmes as well as basic services, including health, water and sanitation and education.

The UN International Poverty Centre, based in Brazil, defines poverty as “a complex set of deprivations in many dimensions that cannot be determined on a basis of low level of income”.

“What poverty is taken to mean depends on who asks the question, how it is understood, and who responds,” said Robert Chambers, a researcher at the UK’s Institute of Development Studies in Sussex.

Historically, measurements have looked at a person’s income (“consumption” poverty), or what a person can get in return for their cash and assets; the fulfilment of basic needs, including food, health, water and sanitation, education and shelter; capabilities.

This is a concept the Indian Nobel laureate and economist, Amartya Sen, developed throughout the 1990s – which measure basic needs fulfilment as well as what individuals are able to accomplish, and a “multidimen-sional” index, which is a recent effort to make poverty measurement more holistic (altomfattende).

Income measurements