This page is an except from Issue 1 / Chapter 1
Cameroon is blessed with so much natural wealth that it could afford to meet all of its citizens’ basic needs. Yet Cameroon is one of the poorest countries on the planet. The United Nations’ preferred way of measuring poverty is called the Multidimentional Poverty Index (MPI). It attempts to account for a multitude of different aspects of poverty beyond a person’s income. The MPI measure includes nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, and household assets. A score of zero means you are not deprived of any of these; a score of 1/3 means you are in multidimensional poverty, and a score of 1/2 puts you in severe multidimensional poverty. But the MPI seems like an exercise in masking the true extent of human suffering: if you have no access to drinking water, no access to sanitation, no cooking fuel, no electricity, and no housing but have access to food and schooling, you would score 5/18. Since 5/18 is less than 1/3, you would not be considered poor. Any rational person, of course, would conclude you are under extraordinary deprivation.
According to the UN, 43.6% of Cameroonians are in multidimensional poverty, with an additional 17.6% classified as “vulnerable to multidimensional poverty”. 24.6% are in severe multidimensional poverty.
There are other ways of measuring poverty, of course. Another way considers specifically income, and the results are shocking: 25.7% of Cameroonians have less than $2.15 income per day – $2.15 per day is the cutoff for “extreme poverty.” However, as with the MPI, measuring poverty in this way seems to be an exercise in masking how dire global poverty is. Americans who have traveled to less developed countries have no doubt noticed that a dollar can buy a lot more stuff than that same dollar in the US. So when people hear about $2.15 per day poverty, they think this must be somehow liveable because $2.15 in Cameroon goes so much farther than it does in the US.
Not so. The $2.15 cutoff is actually adjusted for what’s called purchasing power. When this type of poverty is measured, researchers adjust for the fact that $2.15 goes farther in, say, Cameroon than in the US. In other words, it’s not really $2.15 per day; it’s less than that. Surviving in Cameroon on $2.15 after adjusting for purchasing power is like trying to survive in the US on $2.15 per day.
Again, this way of measuring poverty seems like an exercise in deceiving the public on how dire global poverty is: it is natural to assume that $2.15 (or $64.50 per month) represents some kind of liveable wage in Cameroon because $2.15 goes so much father in Cameroon than in the US. Too few people look more closely at the methodology and discover that – because of purchasing power adjustments – “extreme poverty” in countries like Cameroon is like trying to survive on $64.50 per month in the US.