Yes We Can and Yes We Must! Measuring Well-being and Progress in Developing Countries

This article, by Salema Gulbahar is part of the Wikiprogress series on the Global Forum for Development 2013 and post-2015, it reports specifically on the “Measuring Well-being and Progress in Developing Countries” session at the Forum.

Martine Durand opened the session and outlined the key questions to be addressed by the three panellists (full profiles below):

1. Does it make sense to talk about a more holistic approach to development when millions of people in developing countries still confronting extreme poverty and have unmet need for basic services including food, shelter and basic health care?
2. What is the relationship between concepts such as poverty, social cohesion and progress?
3. Can well-being be measured in countries that have less developed statistical systems, and what have been the specific challenges for Morocco and Mexico as they endeavored to do this? 

Photo by OECD/Christian Moutarde of  Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo, Former President, Federal Republic of Nigeria

“Yes we can and yes we must” measure development using a more holistic approach insisted Allister McGregor. There is a need for a common framework to assess and measure development for well-being in developed and developing countries as the boundaries between the two are becoming blurred.  The OECD provides a conceptual framework that can be taken and applied to individual country context. People’s well-being and aspiration can be expressed in most languages. 

Conceptually what is happening?

Income has been substituted for well-being and it was assumed that growth will deliver well-being for everyone but this is not so. To deliver well-being for everyone a  multi-dimensional approach is required. This does not replace existing measures as people still need food, shelter and water. Well-being is achieved though relationships, thus one needs to understand that well-being is a social concept. Methodological innovations are important as previously we suffered from ‘one size fits all’ idea.

"If people are what development is about, why do we not put them at the heart of our thinking and our measurement of development? "Allister McGregor.

Decision makers need to take the voices off the poor into consideration.  We need systemized, regular consultation, to include these voices in the global conversation – a bottom up approach. But everyone wants something different, so political systems need to be able to integrate the voices of people that are never heard, with a vision of where we are going ultimately. We should use human well-being as a focal point as it goes beyond income.

Gerardo Leyva Parra addressed the challenges for Mexico in developing well-being measures.  The first challenge was convincing people within the institution that measuring well-being beyond GDP and happiness in Mexico was possible and not only for developed countries.  They realised the potential for using well-being as a key tool in the measurement of development in Mexico.

Finding specific indicators was a challenge and thus the discussions were taken outside the walls of the institutions, involving government officials, think tanks, civil society and the private sector.  This continuous dialogue is essential and the need to be able to communicate that going beyond GDP and measuring happiness does not mean forgetting about basic material needs. The next step is to ensure that the new indicators are integrated and taken up by decision makers.

There is also a need to look at subjective well-being statistics from a positive rather than normative perspective. The micro data of subjective well-being surveys can provide valuable insights about the drivers that allow some people to live happy, more satisfactory and meaningful lives than others.

Mexico: Key learning from the process: 

1. Develop relevant indicators, with all stakeholder involved in the decision
2. Communicate the measuring progress beyond GDP concept
3. Keep in touch with relevant stakeholder with continuous dialogue to ensure indicators stay pertinent.

Providing decision maker with the data necessary to allow them to make informed decision about people’s well-being.

Khalid Soudi discussed the Morocco experience. Since the 1990s, the country has developed qualitative questions and found a divergence between the indicators and the perspective of the population. Thus a gap emerges between the finding of objective and subjective well-being responses, this highlights the importance of capturing people’s views.  

Morocco has three elements in its approaches and the global objective of providing decision maker with the data necessary allow them to make informed decision about people’s well-being:

  

• Social economic indicators – it has developed pallet of indicators on different dimension of well-being (the choices were dependent on the population – legitimized by people).
• Quality of life measurements - taking into account the affects and constraints people face and how this contributes to people’s well-being generally.
• Subjective well-being with different domains.

For several years, the HCP has been collecting and analysing qualitative data on public perceptions of their economic and social realities by:

• Including modules and subjective questions, of quantitative nature in regular surveys
• Conducting qualitative surveys (business, household, economic, survey companies etc. on the perception of the development of living standards).
• Implementing several analytical projects combining objective and subjective perceptions of the population data.
• Calculating and publishing the quarterly index of consumer confidence.

Morocco carried out a national study that included:

• a sample of: 3,200 people aged 15 years and older (including 2,080 in urban areas),
• a household questionnaire on socio- demographic characteristics of its members and living conditions,
• an Individual questionnaire on well-being (given to one adult per household) and
• a classification of fields and factors of well-being that were developed and validated on the basis a pilot survey.

Three groups of well-being dimensions were identified (see slide): 1) material well-being -  housing and income, 2) social domain - employment, health and education and 3) societal domain - family life and social environment including cultural, spiritual and recreation aspect of life.

See the full presentation, here.

Read the full background paper: Measuring Well-Being for Development

The session was moderated by: Ms. Martine Durand, Chief Statistician and Director of Statistics Directorate, OECD

Panelists included:

• Mr. Khalid Soudi, Observatoire des Conditions de Vie de la Population, Haut Commissariat au Plan, Morocco (Download PPT)
• Mr. Allister McGregor, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), United Kingdom
• Mr. Gerardo Leyva Parra, Deputy Director General for Research, National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), Mexico  

Watch the video broadcast of the Forum, here.

Salema Gulbahar

(Wikiprogress Coordinator)

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Human Development Report: a glass half full

This ProgBlog article written by Susan Nicolai is part of the Wikiprogress Post-2015 series.

Questions over whether the glass is half full or half empty seem to be a common backdrop these days in the world of international development. With the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) deadline of 2015 fast approaching, and prospects of very few targets being met, a kind of angst is leaving many to wonder whether there is greater cause for optimism or despair. At first glance, a quick appraisal presents a depressingly mixed picture, with the biggest emerging story being persistent inequalities both within and between countries. Not terribly encouraging.

Yet the 2013 Human Development Report (HDR) – ‘The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World’ – sits firmly in the glass half full camp, even in the face of unmet targets and an unequal world. What has put it there? First of all, much of the report’s analysis is framed by a view that considers the starting rather than the finish line, that is, life for many on the planet is better than it used to be, even if it doesn’t yet look as it should. Second – and although there’s a clue in the title, this needs a drumroll – the report lays claim to a kind of ‘delta’ of development, presenting the case for how ‘the South as a whole is driving global economic growth and societal change for the first time in centuries’. We’ll come back to this.

But first, the evidence laid out in the report does a pretty good job of justifying its optimistic lens. Most strikingly, it shows that more than 40 developing countries have outpaced expected gains in human development in recent decades – going beyond the better-known growth stories like those of the BRICS(Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to include a number of smaller countries such as Chile, Ghana and Thailand. Analysis presented includes the following:

• Worldwide, the proportion of people in extreme income poverty fell from 43% to 22% between 1990 and 2008, meaning the first of the MDGs, on poverty eradication, has been achieved ahead of schedule.
• The South’s share of the middle-class population expanded rapidly between 1990 and 2010, rising from 26% to 58%.
• Fourteen countries have recorded rates of progress of more than 2% on the Human Development Index annually since 2000, with Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia perhaps unexpectedly at the top of this list.
• No country for which complete data are available has regressed from where it was at in 2000.

Not a bad run – yet amid this good news the bad is not ignored, with acknowledgement that, for many, the glass may still appear half empty. Severe poverty remains a problem for more than 1.57 billion people, and, while there have been reductions in inequality in areas such as health and education, income inequality is on the rise. Pockets of deprivation remain in every region of the world, and, as the report notes, ‘There is a “south” in the North and a “north” in the South’.

Geographical similes aside, and getting back to the main cause for optimism highlighted in the report, recognition of the rise of the South is significant, if not exactly breaking, news. The fact that there has been a dramatic rebalancing of economic strength increasingly places developing countries in the driver’s seat. This naturally leads on to questions of what works once countries are in this position. While the report’s exploration of some of the key characteristics is helpful – operating as a proactive ‘developmental state’, taking advantage of global markets, social policy investment and innovation – it is just a taster; a closer look at the where, how and who of progress is needed.

Luckily, a number of other efforts are underway to further explore and present what works in development. The Overseas Development Institute’s (ODI’s) Development Progress project, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Better Life Initiative and Princeton’s Innovations for Successful Societies  are but a few of these initiatives, with others highlighted on WikiProgress, a growing global platform for sharing information on progress.

Moreover, the changing face of Africa is a particularly hot topic at the moment, with a closer look at progress on the continent through the Africa Progress Panel, the campaign to See Africa Differently, recent research showing the strength of progress by African ‘lions’ and an Economist debate on how real the rise of progress is in Africa, among others. The changing role of the South in development is also beginning to receive its due consideration, and was the focus of a recent conference by ODI’s Centre for Aid and Public Expenditure.

Today’s report is another reminder that the world isn’t changing – it has already changed, and in many places for the better. The optimism of its message is important in maintaining momentum to further improve development outcomes and balance out frustration that poverty and deprivation remain. Clearly, countries across the global South are playing a central role in driving development and in shaping the global future.

This article first appeared on the ODI's Development Progress blog.

Thank you everyone who commented on our online consultation. - “Reducing poverty is achievable: Finding those who are hidden by inequalities”. In the end we got over 50 comments and we look forward to bringing you our report on the discussion in the coming months. If you still want to contribute then never fear, The discussion continues on #OECDgfd website http://bit.ly/13XwOgu.

The Wikiprogress Team