Discover the report: Multidimensional Poverty Index Report.

Poverty has many dimensions that go beyond its monetary expression. There is a growing need to better understand the multiple ways in which people experience poverty, as well as the importance of measuring the deprivations people face. Better understanding of these aspects is essential to making better public policy decisions. There are clear parallels with human development, the full understanding of which requires consideration of many dimensions of life, from health, education, and income to participation and empowerment.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has pioneered the development of broader measures of poverty such as the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) which aims to broaden the debate on poverty by taking into account its subjective side: people can also be considered poor because of what they feel, what they value.

In order to effectively fight poverty in Djibouti, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Solidarity and the National Institute of Statistics of Djibouti, with the support of UNDP, conducted a study to define the multidimensional poverty index for Djibouti.

The Multidimensional Poverty Index captures the acute deprivations in health, education, and living standards that a person faces simultaneously. The MPI for Djibouti covers 5 dimensions: education, health, living conditions, health environment, and employment, based on 14 indicators that reflect socioeconomic information tailored to the Djiboutian context.

The thresholds of the indicators are based on an international consensus, such as the SDGs.

The analyses, based on the 2017 EDAM survey, indicate that there are about 33.66% of multidimensional poor households, i.e., they are deprived of at least 1/3 of the indicators out of the 14 selected. The incidence rate or the proportion of households in a situation of multidimensional poverty has decreased by about 13 percentage points compared to the analyses done on EDAM 2012. In 2012, this figure is estimated at 46.61% of the population.

The deprivations are concentrated in the dimensions of the health environment, household living conditions and housing. This shows the various challenges faced by the Republic of Djibouti to eliminate poverty.

On the other hand, the index in rural areas is four times higher than in urban areas. Rural households suffer more deprivation on average than urban households, and there are different urban and rural poverty profiles. In rural areas, the "living conditions" dimension contributes more than the employment and education dimensions to multidimensional poverty. In terms of decomposition of the MPI by region and by indicator, education and health-related poverty is more pronounced in the interior regions. Poor residents in the commune of Balbala (arrondissements 4 and 5 of Djibouti-ville) are more affected by deprivation in access to health care and deprivation related to housing conditions and equipment ownership.

The study also shows that some indicators have improved significantly between 2012 and 2017. These include the incidence rate of school-age children not attending school decreased by 8.1% and the incidence rate of households without flush toilets or improved latrines or sharing toilets decreased by 18.6%.

In 2017, the hard core of poverty consists of 12.29% ( of the Djiboutian population suffering from double poverty (monetary and multidimensional). 

The Djibouti Multidimensional Poverty Index is a tool that will allow policymakers to better target their policies to fight poverty more effectively. The MPI also allows the identification of interconnections between the deprivations experienced by the poor and shows the impact of these programs over time.