The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, developed by OPHI and the United Nations Development Programme, has reshaped how governments and researchers think about deprivation since its launch in 2010. By combining indicators of health, education, and living standards, it complements income-based measures and has informed policies aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals across more than one hundred countries. Yet the Global MPI was engineered for acute poverty. Its housing indicators, such as access to clean cooking fuel, improved sanitation, electricity, and adequate building materials, are calibrated to detect subsistence-level deficits. The 2024 edition covers 112 countries, of which only four are high-income, and in wealthier settings the index’s thresholds often fail to register the subtler deprivations that constrain well-being: unaffordable rents, insecure tenure, poor thermal comfort, or neighborhoods cut off from opportunity.

The conceptual foundation of the new proposal is the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights’ 1991 definition of adequate housing, which identifies seven core elements: security of tenure; availability of services, materials, facilities, and infrastructure; affordability; habitability; accessibility; location; and cultural adequacy. The authors distill these into twelve indicators organized around five measurable subdimensions, deliberately excluding cultural adequacy and accessibility from the core index. Cultural adequacy, they argue, is too subjective and context-dependent to standardize, while accessibility needs, such as adaptations for household members with disabilities, apply only to a subset of households and are better handled as disaggregation variables than as universal index components.

One of the most striking contributions is the treatment of housing occupancy insecurity. The proposed composite indicator integrates irregular or informal tenure, payment-related insecurity, and prospective exposure to eviction, treating them as facets of a single underlying condition rather than separate deprivations. The evidence base for this choice is sobering. Prindex data show that perceived tenure insecurity has risen sharply in recent years, particularly in upper-middle- and high-income countries, and that in 2024 only 44 percent of adults across 108 countries considered themselves owners or joint owners of their primary residence, down from 49 percent in 2020. Habitat for Humanity estimates that more than 20 percent of the world’s population struggles to remain in their homes and more than 70 percent lack legal documentation of their property rights.

Eviction, the sharpest expression of tenure insecurity, carries consequences that ripple far beyond the loss of shelter. Research in the United States links eviction to heightened poverty risk, homelessness, adverse health outcomes, reduced earnings, and lasting damage to credit records, and children account for four out of every ten people threatened with eviction each year. Yet reliable eviction data are notoriously scarce. Administrative statistics are fragmented, often capturing only early procedural stages, and household surveys systematically underrepresent those who have been evicted. The authors propose a direct survey question on eviction risk, modeled on instruments such as the United States Household Pulse Survey, as a feasible way to capture this dimension. Notably, the indicator is designed to distinguish deprivation from lifestyle: it targets households that lack both ownership and any legally recognized secure tenure, avoiding the misclassification of voluntary renters, a group that includes many young, mobile professionals.

Affordability receives equally careful treatment. Housing cost overburden, already a standardized metric in the European Union through the EU-SILC survey, measures the share of household disposable income absorbed by housing costs. The scale of the problem is global: Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that 31.5 percent of United States households spend more than 30 percent of income on housing, while UN-Habitat finds that 55.4 percent of households in Sub-Saharan Africa exceed the same threshold. Because many surveys used for poverty measurement lack reliable income data, the authors recommend expenditure-share or residual-income approaches consistent with European and OECD practice, while acknowledging the conceptual tension this introduces with the capability framework that underpins most multidimensional poverty indices.

The module also modernizes the housing dimension for the digital age. Limited access to digital communication and information joins the indicator set, reflecting how connectivity now shapes education, employment, financial inclusion, and social participation. Internet usage exceeds 90 percent in high-income countries but falls to just 25 percent in low-income countries, and housing characteristics such as tenure insecurity and infrastructure quality can prevent households from investing in reliable service. Evidence from deprived communities shows that introducing household internet access improves mental well-being, social connectedness, and employment prospects, particularly among the elderly and those with low educational attainment. By focusing on household-level infrastructure rather than digital literacy, the indicator captures structural barriers without straying beyond the housing dimension.

Physical conditions remain central to the proposal. Overcrowding is measured through two complementary standards: a room-based threshold of more than one person per room and minimum floor-area benchmarks drawn from recent research on spatial requirements, proposing 30 square meters for single-person households, 45 for couples, and 60 for households of three or more. The health stakes are well documented, from the transmission of infectious diseases to persistent negative effects on children’s academic achievement and behavior. Inadequate housing conditions, including dampness, leaks, and structural damage, are captured through a combination of interviewer observation and self-reported questions with a one-year reference period, a design choice that catches seasonal problems such as rain-driven leaks. Thermal adequacy is framed neutrally as protection against both cold and heat, ensuring relevance in tropical climates where cooling, not heating, is the primary concern, a critical distinction given that energy poverty now affects roughly one in ten low-income households even in affluent Northern European countries.

The proposal extends beyond the front door to the neighborhood itself, incorporating indicators of crime context and environmental quality. Decades of research on neighborhood effects, including landmark studies tracking families who moved from extreme-poverty areas, show that children exposed to higher-opportunity neighborhoods experience lasting gains in education and earnings, while local crime depresses mental health and life satisfaction even among those never directly victimized. Environmental indicators cover pollution, water reliability, waste management, and access to services, with the authors noting that self-reported low water pressure correlates strongly with illness across multiple countries. Methodological honesty pervades the paper: the authors flag recall bias, seasonality, urban-rural asymmetries, and the risk of double counting, and they recommend excluding crime indicators where objective data are unavailable or unreliable.

The authors are candid about the module’s limitations. It has not yet been empirically tested, and its thresholds, potential redundancy with existing dimensions, and sensitivity to context all require validation across countries. Homelessness, which a systematic review links to mortality rates between three and eleven times higher than those of housed populations in high-income countries, remains beyond the reach of household surveys and demands complementary data strategies. Cultural adequacy awaits deeper treatment. Even so, the paper represents a significant step toward poverty measurement that reflects how deprivation actually manifests in middle- and high-income societies, where the housing crisis is less about missing walls and more about the precarity of the ones people live behind. If adopted, the module could give policymakers a standardized, comparable lens on the housing deprivations that income statistics alone will never reveal.

Subject of Research: A proposed survey module for measuring housing and essential services deprivation in multidimensional poverty indices for higher human development countries

Article Title: Housing and Access to Essential Services Indicators: a Proposed Survey Module for Multidimensional Poverty Measurement

Article References: Conconi, A., & Serio, M. (2026). Housing and Access to Essential Services Indicators: a Proposed Survey Module for Multidimensional Poverty Measurement. Social Indicators Research, 185(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-026-03907-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-026-03907-8

Keywords: multidimensional poverty, housing deprivation, survey methodology, tenure security, housing affordability, eviction, sanitation, digital connectivity, overcrowding, energy poverty, neighborhood effects, social indicators

The study’s central methodological innovation lies in its four-dimensional framework. The global Multidimensional Poverty Index, developed at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and used by the United Nations Development Programme, traditionally aggregates three dimensions: health, education and standard of living. Mostafa and her colleagues augmented this canonical construct with an additional economic dimension designed to capture the financial fragility that defines urban poverty in a megacity context, where cash incomes are erratic, savings instruments are inaccessible to most, and shocks such as illness, eviction or job loss can instantly tip a household into destitution. By embedding economic indicators alongside the conventional triad, the researchers argue that the resulting index better reflects the lived reality of slum households whose monetary hardship is inseparable from their deficits in schooling, nutrition, housing quality and access to basic services.

The Alkire-Foster counting approach, which underpins the analysis, works by first defining a set of deprivation indicators grouped under each dimension, establishing a deprivation cutoff for each indicator, and then identifying individuals who fall below those cutoffs. Each person accumulates a deprivation score equal to the weighted sum of the dimensions in which they are deprived. A poverty cutoff then determines whether that person is classified as multidimensionally poor. Three headline statistics emerge from this machinery: the headcount ratio, which reports the proportion of people who are poor; the intensity of poverty, which reports the average share of weighted deprivations poor people experience; and the adjusted headcount ratio, obtained by multiplying the two, which serves as the headline index and has the useful property of being decomposable across population subgroups, dimensions and indicators.

When the sample was disaggregated by the sex of the household head, a pattern emerged with important policy implications. Male-headed households, which form the majority of the sample, recorded a headcount ratio of 96 percent, an intensity of 49.6 percent and an adjusted headcount ratio of 47.5 percent. Female-headed households fared somewhat better on every metric, with a headcount ratio of 90 percent, an intensity of 48.3 percent and an adjusted headcount ratio of 43.6 percent. The finding runs counter to a widespread assumption in development economics that female-headed households are uniformly worse off, and it echoes results from other contexts, including earlier research in Nicaragua, where female-headed households were likewise found not to be uniformly more deprived. The authors suggest that women who head households in Dhaka’s slums may possess stronger social networks, engagement in income-generating activities such as domestic work and garment-sector employment, and, in some cases, access to remittances, which together cushion some dimensions of deprivation.

The context of the study is critical to interpreting its magnitude. Dhaka has grown explosively over recent decades as climate pressures, riverbank erosion, floods and rural landlessness push migrants toward the capital, where they overwhelmingly settle in informal settlements characterized by overcrowding, insecure tenure and minimal infrastructure. Bangladesh’s own census of slum areas and floating population documents hundreds of thousands of slum households concentrated in Dhaka and Chattogram, and the United Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects project continued rapid urbanization across South Asia through mid-century. Scholars have long warned that conventional income-based poverty lines systematically understate urban deprivation because cities monetize nearly every basic need: water, sanitation, cooking fuel, housing and transport all carry price tags that rural livelihoods often avoid. A household can earn above the national poverty line and still lack safe drinking water, adequate floor space, reliable electricity or any assets to fall back on.

This measurement problem is precisely what the multidimensional approach is designed to solve, and the Dhaka results illustrate its power. In income-poor terms, some slum residents might appear marginally above thresholds; in multidimensional terms, 93 percent are poor. The gap between monetary and multidimensional measurement has been documented globally, with researchers showing that the two approaches identify overlapping but distinct poverty populations, and that a combined approach captures deprivations that either method alone misses. For megacities, where informal settlements sit adjacent to wealthy commercial districts, the adjusted headcount ratio offers city governments a diagnostic instrument that pins down exactly which deprivations dominate and where interventions would yield the largest reductions in the index.

The study was ethically rigorous in its execution. Institutional review board clearance was obtained from Independent University, Bangladesh in September 2022, and every participant signed a written informed consent form, with fingerprint attestation and a witness signature permitted for illiterate respondents. The research was funded by the university under a sponsored research grant, and the authors declare no conflicts of interest. Survey data cannot be shared publicly without the funder’s permission because consent forms specified that responses would remain confidential, though reasonable requests can be accommodated through the funder. These procedural safeguards matter for research in informal settlements, where residents are often wary of enumeration exercises that could be linked to eviction or taxation.

The policy recommendations flowing from the findings are concrete. The authors call on the Department of Youth Development, the Ministry of Education and the Dhaka North and South City Corporations to prioritize job creation, quality education and targeted training programs that equip slum residents with the skills demanded by the formal labor market. They further recommend expanding microcredit activities in cities, building on evidence that financial inclusion supports progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals by enabling asset accumulation, small enterprise formation and consumption smoothing. The emphasis on skills and employment reflects the study’s economic dimension: in an urban labor market saturated with informal work, deprivation in earnings capability propagates directly into deprivations in nutrition, schooling and housing quality, so interventions that raise earning capacity can shift all four dimensions simultaneously.

Beyond Dhaka, the study contributes to a rapidly growing literature that applies multidimensional poverty measurement to urban settings worldwide, from secondary cities in Africa to slums in Varanasi, informal settlements in Lagos and peri-urban districts of Latin America. Its four-dimensional augmentation offers a template for other megacity studies, particularly in South Asia where slum populations are projected to keep growing. The decomposition properties of the Alkire-Foster method mean future surveys could track whether the adjusted headcount ratio of 45.6 percent falls over time, which dimensions drive the change, and whether the gender gap between male- and female-headed households narrows or widens. What the current figures make unambiguously clear is that poverty in Dhaka’s slums is near-universal in incidence and severe in depth, and that measuring it through income alone would obscure the scale of the challenge confronting one of the world’s most densely populated cities.

The choice of Dhaka as a study site carries analytical weight beyond its size. The city’s slum settlements are among the most densely populated informal areas in the world, and the households surveyed there experience a form of deprivation that differs qualitatively from rural poverty. Because nearly every necessity in an urban environment must be purchased, indicators such as cooking fuel, drinking water and sanitation function as direct financial burdens, which helps explain why the authors’ added economic dimension aligns so closely with the deprivations captured under standard of living.

The gendered decomposition also illustrates the practical value of the Alkire-Foster framework’s subgroup decomposability. By computing separate indices for male-headed and female-headed households, the study transforms a single citywide statistic into a comparative diagnostic. The roughly four-point difference in adjusted headcount ratios between the two groups is modest in absolute terms, but its direction challenges targeting heuristics used by NGOs and municipal agencies that assume female household headship signals greater vulnerability. In Dhaka’s slums, the evidence suggests, headship alone is an unreliable proxy for deprivation, and screening households on indicator-level deficits rather than demographic categories would allocate resources more accurately.

The recommendation to expand urban microcredit connects the findings to Bangladesh’s own institutional history, since the country pioneered group-based microfinance models that have since spread globally. Evidence cited in the broader literature links financial inclusion to asset accumulation and consumption smoothing, both of which speak directly to the economic fragility the study measures. At the same time, the authors’ emphasis on job creation and skills training through the Department of Youth Development and the Ministry of Education acknowledges that credit alone cannot resolve deprivations rooted in labor market structure. For city corporations, the adjusted headcount ratio of 45.6 percent provides a baseline against which future surveys can judge whether combined interventions in employment, schooling and services measurably reduce multidimensional poverty across the four dimensions.

Subject of Research: Measurement of multidimensional poverty among low-income slum households in Dhaka, Bangladesh, using an augmented four-dimensional Alkire-Foster index.

Article Title: Multidimensional poverty in a megacity: evidence from low-income households of Dhaka

Article References: Mostafa, N., Saifullah, M. K., & Al-Islam, S. M. (2026). Multidimensional poverty in a megacity: evidence from low-income households of Dhaka. International Review of Economics, 73(2), Article 36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-026-00547-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12232-026-00547-9

Keywords: multidimensional poverty, Dhaka, urban slums, Alkire-Foster method, Bangladesh, megacity, female-headed households, poverty measurement, adjusted headcount ratio, Sustainable Development Goals, microcredit, urban economics