Upholding and committing to the definition of the relevant situation is often a prime mover of change and a force for common purpose. On March 20, Asghar Adelzadeh, chief econometric modeller at Applied Development Research (ADRS) and director of the Academic Programme at Economic Modelling Academy (EMA), presented a seminal paper that transformed the Multidimensional Poverty Index into a dynamic forward-looking tool using South Africa’s data.
This was held at Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS). This is EMA’s home because of deep intellectual and practice-based symbiotic roots in the two institutions. In one go, this groundbreaking work showed the greatest potential and possibilities that South Africa sits on to not only understand the manifestation of the problem, but create pathways that are evidence-based to solve them. I had met Asghar in 2003, and unbeknown to me I was to be part of a duo that would conceive of the creation of the Economic Modelling Academy almost two decades later. I am a co-director with Asghar at EMA, located at GIBS.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index has been assigned to measure the Sustained Development Goals (SDG) 1.2.2, addressing poverty in all its dimensions. Nobel prize laureate Amartya Sen, in his lifelong work on poverty, argues that human beings are battered by all kinds of deprivation and the task is to acknowledge that poverty is multidimensional. Therefore, time spent on sharpening the lens on poverty as multifaceted can advance human development. The Human Development Index (HDI) was an earlier attempt to measure society in a multifaceted way. This was done by the United Nations Development Programme. The Human Development Report Office (HDRO) was responsible for compilation of the report and released the report annually through a global league table from the early 1990s. The report caught the eye of statisticians, and Ian Castles, the chief statistician of Australia, was not pleased. He was livid and published a journal article on the methodological limitations of the report and questioned its statistical base.
The UN Statistical Commission (UNSC) in its programme of work at the time of Castles’ paper, had been seized with the International Comparison Programme (ICP). The ICP is a supreme global statistical activity. This is because it observes three fundamental methodological precepts. These are: commonality of methods, harmonisation and uniformity of statistical units and, most importantly, temporal simultaneity of execution. ICP measures price relatives and computes purchasing power parity adjusted Gross Domestic Products (GDP), which are real, rather than the mostly currency fluctuation-vulnerable defined GDPs. The ICP was now facing a populist measure that was presenting itself on the scene as a global comparator of measurement — the McDonald Index. Because of its increasing hegemonic global reach, there was populism around this measure of the McDonald Index as a global standard. Statisticians were livid that a single consumption item could be used as an evidential base for public policy. Onto the scene also had arrived the HDI. Ian Castles’ rebuttal gave teeth to the commission.
March 20 provided pathways that can lead to awakening from the nightmare and facing the reality that deploying science in our edifice provides the basis for rational, ethical and empathetic response to public affairs.
In 2004, I would lead the charge of a three-team country that spearheaded the challenge of the UN-HDI report at the UNSC. Haishan Fu, now the director of statistics at the World Bank, was an official at the UN-HDI and successfully led a tactical retreat from a hard stance that the Human Development Report Office (HDRO) had assumed at the UNSC. This stance was to be undermined.
At the next UNSC, to the displeasure of the commission, I unleashed a stinging critique of the higher orderly who had stepped in the space and decided to rip the old wounds open. She was sent packing from the UNSC. The South African leg of the HDI was led by Asghar, who was then working for the UNDP. Asghar came to South Africa on the eve of democracy and worked in the Macro Economic Research Group (MERG), the anchor of the RDP. With the demise of the RDP, he joined the UNDP and was responsible for the compilation of the HDI of South Africa. At the UNSC, the South African measures were party to the questioning.
Sabina Alkire of Oxford Poverty Human Development Initiative (OPHI), where I am now a consultant, and James Foster of George Washington University advanced the HDI measure by creating tools in response to Sen’s call that poverty is multidimensional and that that fact must be acknowledged. Scientific work through the Akire-Foster Method elevated Sen’s notion of poverty being multidimensional. Their tools have unlocked the HDI from being harshly criticised by the commission to being embraced. By 2013, I was one of the advocates of MPI and participated actively since then in OPHI to ensure that the goal of eliminating poverty in all its dimensions is measured using the multidimensional poverty index. The statistical commission adopted MPI as a measure of goal 1.2.2.
I met Asghar again in 2015, where I was awed by the amount of intellectual prowess in his work. More importantly, his work was immersed in Stats SA statistical products. My philosophy on teams that the common identity is one of upholding the definition of the relevant situation was met in Asghar’s work, and I immediately sent a team from Stats SA for an immersion in Asghar’s work in California. In addition to this, I asked my team to answer the question whether the nine-point plan of government was going to work as I had doubts about its methodological basis. The answer was it was not going to work. I shared this model-based knowledge with my directors-general counterparts. The reception of these hard facts was met with dismay and, dare I say, a tone deaf response. We now know the effect of the nine-point plan and its subsequent mutations. They all never worked because of their conceptual aversion to science-based evidence.
Thirty years of democracy is a watershed moment. That being so, we are bound to reflect on the science of our statecraft and its adjudged performance by the Indlulamithi Scenarios 2030 and subsequently 2035 that the Gwara-Gwara Scenario has been upon us and the Vulture Nation Scenario has followed. March 20 provided pathways that can lead to awakening from the nightmare and facing the reality that deploying science in our edifice provides the basis for rational, ethical and empathetic response to public affairs. The Multidimensional Poverty Index has been given impetus as a planning tool by Aldezadeh’s tools of modelling in that now one can assess our macro-micro economic and social policy stance on how it affects poverty and thus take appropriate science-based measures and not leave this to the amorphous abracadabra of markets.
Perhaps through this we can usher new hope to a nation which has hitherto been battered in all forms of misgovernance and diminished hope for a better life. We no doubt look at Rwanda, our 1994 sibling comparator, with envy, but with admiration of what we possibly could have been had we deployed the 1994 hope-inspiring moment and undergirded it with evidence-based tools that have increasingly been at our disposal.
Upholding and committing to the definition of the relevant situation is often a prime mover of change and a force for common purpose. Defeating unemployment, poverty and inequality are the prime evils we must defeat through common purpose. Multidimensional poverty measures as a forward-looking arsenal of planning tools provide the requisite and definitive if not the only tools for effectively tackling poverty. The time is now. Any and further excuses are only for fools and we should not suffer fools.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa
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