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Sender, John, Cramer, Christopher and Oya, Carlos (2018) 'Identifying the most deprived in rural Ethiopia and Uganda: A simple measure of socio-economic deprivation.' Journal of Eastern African Studies, 12 (3). pp. 594-612.

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Abstract

The Extreme Deprivation Index uses easily verifiable answers to ten questions about the ownership of the most basic non-food wage goods - things that poor people in a variety of rural contexts want to have because they make a real difference to the quality of their lives. Using this Index, we define rural Ethiopians and Ugandans who lack access to a few basic consumer goods as 'most deprived': they are at risk of failing to achieve adequate education and nutrition; becoming pregnant as a teenager; remaining dependent on manual agricultural wage labour and failing to find to a decent job. As in other African countries, they have derived relatively little benefit from donor and government policies claiming to reduce poverty. They may continue to be ignored if the impact of policy on the bottom 10 per cent can be obscured by fashionably complex indices of poverty. We emphasize the practical and political relevance of the simple un-weighted Deprivation Index: if interventions currently promoted by political leaders and aid officials can easily be shown to offer few or no benefits to the poorest rural people, then pressures to introduce new policies may intensify, or at least become less easy to ignore.

Item Type: Journal Article
Keywords: Ethiopia, Uganda, poverty, index, assets
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > Department of Economics
Departments and Subunits > Department of Development Studies
ISSN: 17531055
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2018.1474416
Date Deposited: 02 May 2018 12:49
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/25799
Funders: Other

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