Vietnam's HCM City takes the lead nationwide in application of multi-dimensional poverty measures initiated by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) , assessed experts at a seminar here on Tuesday.
The seminar on Multi-dimensional Poverty Measurement was jointly hosted by the City's Steering Committee for Poverty Reduction and Improved Household Livelihoods and UNDP, in collaboration with the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI).
The event highlighted the value of Multi-dimensional Poverty ( MDP) methods to the governance and delivery of public services. Representatives from HCM City's authorities, the central government and the National Assembly discussed plans to implement the MDP in the City and useful lessons for the National MDP process.
"Multi-dimensional poverty approaches have achieved global traction by providing a robust alternative to - and complement - income-based measures," said UNDP Deputy Country Director Bakhodir Burkhanov at the seminar. "They are particularly applicable in middle income countries like Vietnam and in such urban context as HCM City, where poverty is more complex and defined by a number of interlocking deprivations," said the UNDP official.
He also praised HCM City for its use of multi-dimensional poverty as pioneering efforts to design better-targeted policies.
HCM City piloted the MDP for monitoring, evaluation and policy formulation. The first Urban Poverty Survey (UPS) took place in 2009, as part of the UNDP project, "Support to In-depth Study on Urban Poverty in capital Hanoi and HCM City."
The second UPS survey, conducted in 2012, was part of the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey. It provided more detail data on the trends and scope of multi-dimensional poverty in the two cities.
With the UN support, Vietnam is among the 32 countries in the world to pioneer the research and application of multi-dimensional poverty measures, which helps Vietnam better understand the root causes of poverty and design better-targeted policies and programs.