UNDP Regional Project for Overcoming Poverty

THE REGIONAL Project for Overcoming Poverty, initiated in the late 1980s and administered by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), is a project designed for improving the living conditions of the poor. It was first applied in various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The distinguishing feature of this project is the practical application of the combined methods of poverty line (PL) and unsatisfied basic needs (UBN) for determination, measurement, and description of poverty. The poverty line method is used primarily to identify the poor and estimate poverty incidence and gaps, while the UBN indicators were used mainly for poverty profiling and targeting policies.

The poverty line means the income of an individual or group of individuals (household) is below the level where they cannot afford to purchase all the resources like food, goods, and services that they require to live. Based on the buying power of the individuals of a basket of basic food and nonfood needs, the PL approach in the project established parameters and constructed a poverty line.

Using the UBN method, the UNDP Regional Project for Overcoming Poverty measured poverty in terms of people's access to basic necessities, including food and nonfood goods, as well as basic social services such as health, education, water and sanitation, and housing. Under the unsatisfied basic needs approach, the project evaluated the presence of household variables such as school-age children (ages 6 to 12) who are not attending school, critical overcrowding (three to four persons per room), inadequate housing (type of housing), housing that lacks basic services, lack of a water closet (sanitary conditions), and high economic dependency.

In Latin America the UBN exercise found that a large number of people were sharing a room, people lived in improvised or inadequate housing, they had inadequate water supply and inadequate sewer systems, they had a low school attendance for children, and they exhibited low household capacity to generate sufficient income.

The UBN approach not only involved the selection of a certain number of needs, the definition of minimum criteria to satisfy for each need, and the combination into poverty indexes, but also it tried to examine other factors, such as lack of participation in collective decisions, social marginalization, and discouragement. [Page 1089]The unsatisfied basic needs approach enabled the UNDP Regional Project for Overcoming Poverty to analyze the long-term problems and create poverty maps. It was especially useful in the formulation of poverty-relief social policy.

Based on its findings, the project has defined poverty as a state that makes it impossible for an individual or a family to satisfy one or more basic needs and to participate fully in the life of society. Using the combined UBN-PL method of measuring poverty, the project tried to estimate the number of people living in poverty in Latin America and to forecast the state of poverty for 1986, 1990, 1995, and 2000.

In 1989, the UNDP Regional Project for Overcoming Poverty had published a three-volume set of reports with recommendations of appropriate technologies for developing societies, collected around the world by United Nations researchers. In particular, they included multiple components related to housing for the poor, social services, employment and income generation, community building, and local development programs, including agroforestry.

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