poverty & corruption in Ethiopia

Ethiopia & poverty: Ethiopia Ranks the second poorest country in the world and Africa, Oxford University study reveals

http://www.ophi.org.uk/

Ethiopia & the extents of  its poverty

(OPHI) –The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), published by Oxford University reveals that Ethiopia ranks the second poorest country in the world and Africa, just ahead of Niger. The study is based on analysis of acute poverty in 108 developing countries around the world. Despite making progress at reducing the percentage of destitute people, Ethiopia is still home to more than 76 million poor people (out of total population of 87 million). 87.3% of Ethiopians are classified as MPI poor, while 58.1% are considered destitute. Oxford University says poverty is not just about a lack of money. It’s also about not having enough food, education, healthcare and shelter, and some poor are much worse off than others.

A person is identified as multidimensionally poor (or ‘MPI poor’) if they are deprived in at least one third of the weighted MPI indicators. The destitute are deprived in at least one-third of the same weighted indicators, The Global MPI uses 10 indicators to measure poverty in three dimensions: education, health and living standards.

In rural Ethiopia 96.3% are poor while in the urban area the percentage of poverty is 46.4%.

The 10 Poorest Countries in the World:

1. Niger
2. Ethiopia
3. Mali
4. Burkina Faso
5. Burundi
6. Somalia
7. Central African Republic
8. Liberia
9. Guinea
10. Sierra Leone

According to Dr. Sabina Alkire — director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, the U.N. Millennium Development Goals – which set targets regarding poverty, hunger, malnutrition, health and other issues – expire at the end of next year. Thus,  MPI could help in the creation of a replacement for the MDGs that gives a complete picture of poverty. “We need a replacement that keeps our eyes really focused on human poverty and the pain and suffering that it entails, but also brings in the environment. And our suggestion is really simple. That along side the $1.25 a day measure – or some extreme income poverty measure – that we bring into view these people who are multidimensionally poor. And that we can do so with a measure of destitution and a measure of multidimensional poverty and maybe even a measure of vulnerability that would be more appropriate for middle and high income countries.”

graph_mpi_percnt_poor_deprvd

OPHI Country Briefing 2014: Ethiopia

    See more @ Oxford and Human Development Initiative (2014). “Ethiopia Country Briefing”, Multidimensional Poverty Index Data Bank. OPHI, University of Oxford. Available at /.

    http://www.ophi.org.uk/multidimensional-poverty-index/mpi-country-briefings

More reference to famine in Ethiopia:

    In the last two or three decades, there has been a revolution in thinking about the
    explanations of famines. The entitlement’s approach by Amartya Sen brought the issue
    of food accessibility to the forefront of the academic debate on famine. Sen noted that,
    often enough, there is enough food available in the country during famines but all
    people do not have the means to access it. More specifically, famines are explained by
    entitlement failures, which in turn can be understood in terms of endowments,
    production possibilities, and exchange conditions among others (Sen, 1981).
    Ethiopia is a good case in point where, for instance, food was moving out of Wollo
    when the people in the region were affected by the 1972-3 famine (Sen, 1981), and even
    today some regions in Ethiopia produce surplus, while people in other regions face
    famine threats. There are of course infrastructural problems in the country to link the
    surplus producing regions to the food-deficit ones. However, the question goes beyond
    this simplistic level, as some people simply do not have enough entitlements to have a
    share of the food available in the country, a situation which can be described as a case
    of direct entitlement failures (Tully 2003: 60)7. Or else, peasants do not find the right
    price for their surplus, as in the 2002 Bumper Harvest which ended up in an 80 per cent
    price drop, which illustrated a failure in peasants’ exchange entitlements. Alternatively,
    the most irrigated land of the country in the Awash River basin, for instance, is used
    primarily for cash crop production to be exported to the western world (even when there
    is drought) leading the vulnerability of various pastoralist groups to turn into famine or
    underpinned by what is known as a crisis in endowments and production possibilities.
    In short, while drought and population pressure can partly explain famine threats in
    Ethiopia, the entitlements approach provides an explanation from an important but less
    visible angle. By shifting the attention from absence of food to lack of financial access
    to food, the approach points in the direction of policy failures. That only some classes in
    society are affected by famine clearly indicates that policy failures are central to the