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 research team, led by anthropologist Justin Raycraft of the University of Lethbridge alongside Edwin Maingo Ole of Sokoine University of Agriculture and Franco Peniel Mbise of the University of Dodoma, chose Olasiti deliberately. Few places on Earth pack so many different conservation models into one community’s backyard. The village borders Tarangire National Park, a state-run stronghold famed for its elephants; the Manyara Ranch Conservancy, a multiple-use ranch that permits regulated seasonal grazing; the Burunge Wildlife Management Area, a community-based zone with mixed-use zoning; and the Kwa Kuchinja Wildlife Corridor, a de facto movement route for migrating large mammals that has never been formally demarcated on the ground.

Between 2020 and the surrounding twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, the researchers administered questionnaire surveys to 89 residents and conducted in-depth interviews with 20 more, half of them women, in kiSwahili and Maa. Survey data were analyzed using ordinal logistic regression models that tested whether gender, ethnicity, education, age, farm size, and livestock holdings predicted attitudes toward each conservation area. Interview transcripts were coded through a grounded theory approach to uncover why people felt the way they did. The dual-method design proved essential, because the numbers alone sometimes told a misleading story.

The quantitative results were striking. Across all four conservation models, men held significantly more negative attitudes than women. For Tarangire National Park, which received the warmest survey ratings overall, education mattered: respondents with no formal schooling were significantly less favorable than those with secondary education. For Manyara Ranch, attitudes grew more negative as farm size and livestock holdings increased, suggesting that households most dependent on grazing perceived the ranch as a competitor rather than a partner. Ethnicity predicted attitudes only toward Burunge Wildlife Management Area, where Kisongo Maasai respondents were more supportive than their WaArusha neighbors. Age mattered for the ranch, with younger residents markedly less supportive than elders.

But the interviews revealed what the questionnaires could not. Tarangire National Park drew largely positive survey responses, with 65 percent of respondents expressing favorable views, yet beneath that surface lay a more complicated reality. Many residents, particularly Arusha cultivators who settled the area after the park was gazetted in 1970, had adapted to its presence and appreciated tangible benefits delivered through the park’s Community Conservation Programme: access to a health dispensary, funeral assistance, help dealing with problem animals, and condolence payments. At the same time, the researchers found evidence of what political scientists call public and hidden transcripts. Some residents appeared cautious about criticizing an institution they associated with state authority, and an elderly woman in Eluai sub-village, which shares a boundary with the park, described fines for stepping across the border and firewood collection bans that stood in sharp contrast to the compliant survey answers of her neighbors.

The clearest pattern to emerge from the qualitative data concerned rangeland access. Areas associated with seasonal livestock grazing were received favorably, while areas perceived to threaten tenure security or increase human-wildlife conflict were viewed negatively. Manyara Ranch, despite its political distance from Olasiti, earned appreciation precisely because it opens to herders from surrounding villages in the dry season under a seasonal grazing plan enforced by game scouts. One elderly woman crystallized the contrast bluntly: she liked Manyara Ranch because livestock could graze there, and disliked Tarangire because livestock were not allowed. For pastoralists whose wealth, identity, and food security ride on cattle, goats, and sheep, the opportunity costs of conservation regulations are not abstract policy considerations but daily economic realities.

Attitudes toward the Kwa Kuchinja Wildlife Corridor were the most negative of all, with nearly half of survey respondents expressing dislike and a remarkable 45 percent saying they did not know what the corridor was, despite living inside it. The corridor exists in ecological theory but has never been legally demarcated, partly because formal wildlife corridor designation in Tanzania prohibits all human settlement and land use within its boundaries. Villagers understood this legal implication all too well. They viewed the corridor as a potential gateway to displacement and a threat to the land tenure security guaranteed under the Village Land Act. Compounding the resentment, wildlife dispersing from Tarangire onto village land during the wet season destroys crops and threatens livestock, generating costs for communities while the benefits of safari tourism flow elsewhere. Residents reasoned that conservation areas should be for wildlife and villages should be for people.

Burunge Wildlife Management Area, often held up as a flagship of community-based conservation, inspired ambivalence rather than outright opposition. Nearly half of respondents were neutral and 39 percent knew nothing about it. Interviews exposed a spectrum of feeling tied to grazing: resentment among those who had experienced or heard of confrontations with WMA authorities, including accounts of burned homesteads and beaten herders in earlier years, alongside gratitude from those who received village funds from tourism revenues or maintained seasonal homesteads within the WMA. Notably, 38 percent of survey respondents said they would prefer Olasiti withdraw from WMA membership altogether, a signal of unresolved tensions over benefit distribution that echo earlier scholarship documenting conflicts over revenue sharing in Tanzania’s wildlife management areas.

The gendered dimension of the findings deserves particular attention. The researchers attribute men’s consistently more negative attitudes to the cultural division of labor in Maasai society, in which men typically herd livestock and bear the direct, visible costs of grazing restrictions, fines, and carnivore depredation, while women manage the domestic sphere and may value indirect benefits such as health services and infrastructure. The pattern underscores that conservation policy cannot treat communities as monolithic blocks; the same protected area imposes different costs and confers different benefits depending on gender, age, ethnicity, and household assets.

The study’s policy implications are direct. The authors argue that direct effects on livelihoods are the most policy-actionable levers for building conservation support in this social-political-ecological context, even more than governance reform, important though institutional dynamics remain. They call for stronger community awareness campaigns about under-recognized models like WMAs and corridors, gender-sensitive engagement strategies, expanded benefit-sharing mechanisms, participatory land-use planning that values herding and subsistence cultivation, and deliberate efforts to engage younger residents who showed the least support for nearby ranches. They also caution, methodologically, that questionnaire surveys alone would have produced a partial and at times misrepresentative picture; only by pairing regression models with ethnographic immersion and open-ended interviews did the full texture of community sentiment become visible. As conservation expands across sub-Saharan Africa under global biodiversity targets, the lesson from Olasiti is that wildlife protection will endure only where it secures, rather than undermines, the rangelands, farms, and futures of the people who live beside it.

Subject of Research: Community attitudes toward four conservation models in a Tanzanian village, shaped by livelihood impacts and rangeland access.

Article Title: Livelihood impacts and rangeland access shape community attitudes towards four conservation models in a Tanzanian village

Article References: Livelihood impacts and rangeland access shape community attitudes towards four conservation models in a Tanzanian village. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44353-026-00093-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44353-026-00093-z

Keywords: conservation attitudes, Tanzania, rangeland access, pastoralism, wildlife management areas, national parks, wildlife corridors, human-wildlife conflict, livelihoods, community-based conservation, gender, tenure security