Ninety percent of Ethiopian children under the age of 10 are poor when health, education, water, sanitation and assets are measured together, according to the 2019 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index released by UNDP.
Children at a village school near Lake Langano, Oromia, December 2017 (Ninara, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0) [file photo]
The figure was highlighted at a media briefing in Addis Ababa by Turhan Saleh, the UNDP resident representative in Ethiopia, and Haile Kibret, a UNDP national economist, Anadolu Agency reported. Saleh said overall poverty had improved but that the number of children in deep poverty was a serious concern. “We have some work left,” he said. “The rate at which population is growing is faster than the rate at which poverty is being reduced.”
Ethiopia’s index improved between 2011 and 2016, which Saleh credited largely to investment in water, sanitation, education and health. “Ethiopia made the largest improvements in nutrition, school attendance, drinking water and assets,” a UNDP press release said.
The 2019 index covers 101 countries and 1,119 subnational regions, home to 76 percent of the world’s population. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia account for 84.5 percent of the world’s multidimensionally poor people. In sub-Saharan Africa the share of poor people ranges from 6.3 percent in South Africa to 91.9 percent in South Sudan.
A separate Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis by the World Food Programme and Ethiopia’s Central Statistical Agency, published the same month, estimated that 20.5 percent of households, or about 26 million people, were food insecure in 2016. The analysis drew on surveys of about 30,229 households. It said the number would have been much higher without food assistance to around 18 million people through emergency aid and the Productive Safety Net Programme.
Amhara had the highest share of food-insecure households at 36.1 percent, followed by Afar at 26.1 percent and Tigray at 24.7 percent. Rural households were worse off than urban ones, at 22.7 percent against 13.9 percent. Starchy staples made up 71.4 percent of calories, with maize the main source for the poor and teff for the better off. Ethiopians drink about 16.6 kilograms of milk a year, adults eat about 7.5 kilograms of meat, and fruit and vegetable intake meets only 36.4 percent of the WHO recommendation. Nearly one in four households, and 46 percent in the Southern region, had inadequate food consumption in the week before they were surveyed.
Sources: Anadolu Agency, ReliefWeb (WFP/CSA CFSVA 2019)