Multidimensional Poverty in Afghanistan Policy-oriented Report using the 2020 Afghanistan Income Expenditure and Labour Force Survey

Decades of work against poverty has made it clear that it exists in many forms and dimensions. As such, monetary measures of poverty have proven to be deficient in developing a comprehensive policy on poverty reduction. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) was developed to address these limitations by quantifying poverty in three dimensions of depravity: health, education, and living standards. The MPI was adopted to construct the Afghanistan Multidimensional Poverty Index (A-MPI), with additional two dimensions to reflect the depravity in work and experiences of shocks.

This brief presents the results of the 2020 A-MPI, which aims to inform policy priorities and immediate tangible responses to multidimensional poverty in Afghanistan. The versatility of the A-MPI allows for the identification of top deprivations in each province, which permits a more effective targeting of interventions.

Many circumstances changed within Afghanistan in the past two years, prompting this study to employ various simulations to reflect potential shocks in food security, school attendance, and employment. If left to further deteriorate, the study finds that cumulative shocks would raise the level of multidimensional poverty from 49.4% to as high as 88% in the high-impact scenario. Thus, strong and prompt solutions are necessary.