In 2021, the Statistical Institute of Belize began analyzing poverty through a multidimensional lens - meaning looking at outside factors as opposed to simple monetary poverty. Some of these dimensions include unemployment, social exclusion, disasters, and diseases. And today SIB signed an agreement with the UNDP and the Ministry of Economic Development to continue with the development of the Multidimensional Poverty Index, as well as to implement an annual Monetary Poverty Measure. The CEO in the ministry explained that it's necessary to collect the data annually to be better able to address the factors.
Dr Osmond Martinez, CEO, Ministry of Economic Development
"If you look historically, Belize is, the census was done every 10 years, now within the Briceno Administration we acknowledge that poverty is a serious issue therefore when you look at our medium term development strategy, the first strategy within the medium term is poverty reduction and so one of the new polices that was directed to the statistical institute of Belize is to do poverty on an annual basis because we do believe that poverty, once we have high poverty within our economy, that shows that we have some underlying economic health issues. Therefore the only way we will be able to address them is by
being able to reduce poverty and the only way we could know to reduce poverty is by having data on an annual basis and therefore we can have some targeted interventions."
Kishan Khoday, UNDP Resident Rep, Belize
"At the top of our agenda at the moment is combating what we call multidimensional poverty so going beyond just pure income to look at other deprivations and contributions of social vulnerability. Our cooperation that we launched today with the Ministry of Economic Development is focusing on working with the Statistical Institute of Belize and through this cooperation we try to advance the use of the multidimensional poverty index which Belize is taking onboard to really look at the broader nature of assets and capacities that can be built to reduce that social vulnerability of poorest of the poor across Belize."
Diana Castillo Trejo, Director General, SIB
"The support that's being given by the UNDP is to further develop our poverty statistic program which we started in September in 2021 with the launch of the multidimensional poverty index so the UNDP is lending support to further developing that program, providing some capacity building for the SIB and some of the government ministries in how to use this tool for policy making and in addition to that, they are supporting us in the development of updated
monetary poverty estimates so this is to compliment the MPI so we will be able now to assess poverty both my monetary means and multi-dimensional means annually and the support that they're lending in this area is to do an expansion of our labor force survey to collect the data we would need to be able to do the monetary analysis as well as the MPI analysis annually."
The total amount is 130,000 Belize dollars.
