Credit: UNDP

By Michelle Muschett and Sabina Alkire
NEW YORK, Aug 27 2025 (IPS)

The development trajectory of Latin America and the Caribbean is going through a period of unprecedented vulnerability and uncertainty. The significant achievements of past decades, as well as the possibility of continuing to make progress, are under threat from the impact of growing geopolitical tensions, unresolved structural challenges, and an increase in crises of various kinds—environmental, political, health, technological, and social.

These challenges intertwine and reinforce each other, magnifying their impact and overwhelming the response capacity of institutions. Against this backdrop, a fundamental question arises: how can we protect the gains made in human development while continuing to move forward in this new reality?

The answer lies in the very essence of the concept of human development. Since its formulation by the authors of the first UNDP Human Development Report in 1990, economists Amartya Sen and Mahbub ul Haq, the focus of this concept has been on expanding people’s capabilities so that we can lead lives we value and find meaningful.

It is not just about income or material goods, but about health, education, participation, freedom, and dignity. But human development is not static and can suffer setbacks. To safeguard its progress in the face of recurring shocks and to continue expanding capabilities, it is essential to embed resilience as an unconditional requirement.

Beyond mere endurance

In the context of human development, resilience is not limited to enduring or withstanding sudden impacts, nor to restoring a previous state. It is the capacity and agency of human beings to live valuable lives in such a way that they can prevent or mitigate the impact of crises both in their own lives and those of their communities and, if necessary, recreate valuable lives and continue to thrive.

It means that people and communities can reorganize, adapt, and move forward, even—and especially—in the midst of adversity. A system is resilient not because it is immune to shocks, but because it knows how to respond effectively, learn from experience, and emerge stronger.

Just as a house is resilient if, even with modest materials, it withstands an earthquake, protects its inhabitants, and allows life to continue, a health system is resilient if, in the face of a pandemic and despite its limitations, it reorganizes resources, mobilizes staff, welcomes volunteers, requests and absorbs external aid, provides psychological support, recognizes collective effort, and leaves behind strengthened capacities for facing future emergencies.

The key is not to avoid all damage—that would be impossible—but to respond with purpose and to strengthen the system based on experience. In short, resilience is not improvised; it is built.

Agency, capabilities, and human security

Resilient human development rests on three fundamental pillars: capabilities, human security, and agency. Capabilities are the real opportunities people have to live a life they value: being healthy, learning, participating, working with dignity. Human security protects that essential core against persistent or sudden threats such as hunger, violence, natural disasters, or disease.

Agency, meanwhile, is the ability to act according to one’s own values. It is not only about feeling included and being able to choose, but about actively influencing one’s own life and environment: organizing, participating in public life, imagining alternatives even in the midst of crisis.

When people live in contexts of limited freedoms or insecurity—marked, for example, by violence, precariousness, or exclusion—their agency tends to weaken. We may withdraw, lose trust in others, become demobilized, or adopt extreme positions.

This is why a resilient vision of development cannot be limited to the material: it must also strengthen interpersonal trust and the sense of belonging—the emotional, relational, and civic fabric that allows us to act, decide, and rebuild.

An urgent approach for Latin America and the Caribbean

The need to incorporate resilience into human development is particularly pressing in Latin America and the Caribbean. Without a resilient perspective, each crisis can mean significant development losses.

Conversely, if development agents and actors integrate resilience into their management and actions, it is possible to prepare better collectively, minimize damage, and transform systems based on each experience.

From a public management perspective, this means, for example, that public policies anticipate risk contexts—such as designing and implementing education systems that can also function in emergencies; social protection systems that expand households’ capacity to cope with crises and that have pre-established mechanisms to extend benefits to those affected; or care systems that facilitate reintegration into the labor market.

It also means ensuring community support networks and mutual aid mechanisms and, above all, strengthening institutions and individual and collective capacities to anticipate, decide, act, and adapt.

Prioritizing the essential, even with scarce resources

Resilience in public policy requires investment, planning, and consensus around a long-term vision. But it does not always entail large budgetary efforts, even in fiscally constrained contexts. The key is to innovate and prioritize what is essential: identifying which capabilities must be protected at all costs, which services must be maintained even in times of crisis, and which bonds must be strengthened before they break. Innovation is not only technological—it is also social, institutional, and territorial. The region is already applying tools with great potential for scalability and impact to transform realities, expand capabilities, and create opportunities where there was once exclusion, such as innovative applications of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) or inclusive financing instruments with local impact.

The resilience approach from a human development perspective means prioritizing strategically, making evidence-based decisions, and avoiding improvisation to ensure local impact and agency. Furthermore, by explicitly incorporating prevention, preparedness, and recovery into the development agenda and public budgets, the future costs of crises can be significantly reduced.

A compass of hope for uncertain times

Resilient human development protects and adapts the classic concept of human development to today’s challenges. It combines the transformative vision of development with the precaution of human security and the recognition of people as agents of their own destiny, even in the face of adversity.

In a world with fewer certainties, resilience is an ethical, practical, and hopeful compass. For Latin America and the Caribbean, it is also an opportunity—not to resign ourselves to permanent risk, but to turn each challenge into a springboard for more just and cohesive societies.

The future is not written; we build it together. Collective resilience must be at the heart of our responses: it is key to driving economic growth and shared prosperity; to fostering innovative financing and public policies that make it possible to prevent, mitigate, and rebuild lives after a crisis; and to broadening the sense of belonging, increasing human agency and security. Only through collaboration and collective action can we build valuable, dignified, and resilient development and life paths for all people.

Michelle Muschett is Regional Director, UNDP, Latin America and the Caribbean; Sabina Alkire is Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford

This blog is based on findings from the Regional Human Development Report 2025, “Under Pressure: Recalibrating the Future of Development in Latin America and the Caribbean” (coming soon).

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By Michelle Muschett and Sabina Alkire
NEW YORK / OXFORD, UK , Sep 18 2024 (IPS)

Political polarization, the climate emergency, organized crime, migration, and low economic growth currently dominate the public debate in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and rightly so. However, there is a significant structural challenge to human development and democracy itself that, along with inequalities, lies at the root of these crises: poverty.

Today, 181 million people, 29% of the region’s population, live in monetary poverty, and 33 million suffer from acute multidimensional poverty (considering only countries with available data). Advancing towards a prosperous and resilient LAC requires putting poverty in all its forms and dimensions back at the center of public debate and addressing new responses through public policy.

In past decades, the region significantly reduced poverty by taking advantage of economic growth driven by the commodities boom and the introduction of innovative public policies focused on solving this problem, such as conditional cash transfers—schemes where cash is given to households in poverty in exchange for specific investments in human development, such as ensuring school attendance or participation in vaccination campaigns-.

However, this trend began to reverse two years before the pandemic.

Revitalizing the poverty reduction agenda requires resuming this innovative capacity and political will. We have done it in the past, we must do it again, and it is possible. Brazil’s recent proposal to the G20 to promote a Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty is an excellent step in this direction.

To achieve this, it will be essential to better understand and measure the multiple forms and dimensions of poverty, ensure effective inter-institutional coordination for policy design and implementation, and refine the targeting and allocation of resources through new planning instruments. Given the context of low economic growth and limited fiscal space, efficiency is key to accelerating significant achievements.

Ensuring that people in poverty have the capabilities and opportunities to live the life they want requires tools that capture their realities and experiences, including the multiple deprivations that affect them in different dimensions of well-being and go beyond the lack of income.

Not having access to education, water, or health, among others, are significant deprivations that may or may not be correlated with having money—a person may have sufficient income to not be considered poor and yet not have access to healthcare because there is no hospital near his or her community.

The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), launched by UNDP and OPHI in 2010, complements the measurement and analysis of extreme monetary poverty with information about people’s situation in multiple socioeconomic dimensions.

The MPI has been adopted by countries around the world as an official poverty measure, complementing income-based measures and focusing on each country’s priorities, turning them into effective public policy tools that allow for more precise identification of who and where the poor are, and how it varies by age, gender, territory, and ethnicity.

Latin America has been a pioneer in adopting national MPIs, with 12 countries and two major cities—Mexico City and Bogotá—and can once again be a reference for poverty reduction. The success of conditional cash transfers in the past meant a quantitative leap in the utility of monetary poverty data.

It is time to replicate this success by developing new transformative policies that have the same effect on the utility of multidimensional data, taking advantage of the planning, policy articulation, and monitoring possibilities provided by the rich information obtained from complementary use of both measures.

In Honduras, for example, multidimensional data was used to better identify the population with the greatest vulnerabilities as a result of COVID-19 and to more accurately guide cash supports.

On the other hand, a clear articulation between other national policies and poverty reduction goals will also be crucial to achieving greater impact. Policies like those related to productivity, energy, or climate change are often defined in a sectoral manner despite their potential to accelerate poverty reduction.

These links need to be formalized. It is also important to invite actors beyond the public sector to incorporate these analyses and actions to accelerate poverty reduction as part of their development strategies. For example, the Colombian natural gas producers’ association (Naturgas) created an index of strategic municipalities.

This explicitly incorporates an equity dimension through poverty-related variables alongside business variables usually used by private companies in their decision-making processes. This index generates incentives to invest in areas of greater poverty while respecting the natural profit-seeking of these companies.

If we want to get back on track towards eradicating poverty in all its dimensions, we must put poverty and inequality back on the public agenda, promoting spaces for dialogue, collaboration, and consensus around innovative and transformative public policies that allow us to move towards more equal and inclusive societies.

Only in this way we will be on track to achieve sustainable development in LAC. Let’s not wait any longer and make the leap that we need in public innovation for a well-being and human development that leave no one behind.

Michelle Muschett is Director, Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); Sabina Alkire is Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford.

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By Sabina Alkire
LONDON, Oct 12 2021 (IPS)

During the pandemic, we learnt a new word – at least I did: comorbidity. It means that one or more additional conditions co-occur (all happen at the same time for a person) alongside a primary condition – in this case the virus.

And we learnt that when a person has significant comorbidities, the path of the virus can be tragic.

We therefore learned to be highly alert for diabetes, for lung conditions, and medical histories, and to protect vulnerable people in our circles carefully. As time went on, our circle of attention expanded – to handwashing, to overcrowding, to water and nutrition, or informal work – or risks like domestic violence, that make lockdown unbearable.

After a while, this habit of looking into comorbidities felt eerily familiar. Our and other teams working on poverty also scrutinise disadvantages that strike a person all-at-once. Instead of calling these comorbidities, we call them deprivations.

And a large package of deprivations is called multidimensional poverty.

But the idea is really rather similar: those who already have high poverty ‘comorbidities’ (in our language, people who are ‘multidimensionally poor’) are already facing difficulties, and are also most at-risk if a further threat strikes – like the virus.

But just as the virus affected different groups differently, the COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating inequalities that poverty data was only just starting to explore before the pandemic hit.

Let me give an example from the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) produced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) this year.

We studied two layers of ‘co-morbidities’. First, we looked at a set of 10 indicators spanning conditions like child mortality, school attendance, electricity, water, and assets, and found out how many people are deprived in at least one-third of weighted indicators.

Second, we looked at poverty across ethnic groups, and through a gendered and intrahousehold lens. Data are pre-covid, but provide the most up-to-date assessment of all-at-once deprivations – of multidimensional poverty – that we have.

Sabina Alkire. Credit: Kiara Worth IISD/ENB

In the first place, looking across 5.9 billion people in 109 developing countries, we found that 1.3 billion were multidimensionally poor. And in terms of the poverty parallel for ‘comorbidities’, one billion lack clean energy; one billion lack adequate sanitation; one billion have substandard housing, 788 million live with at least one undernourished person and over half lack electricity – even to charge a cell phone or turn on at night.

So, the web of co-deprivations is indeed dense and tightly woven. And this dataset – which incidentally is online with all of these details in many forms, because we want people to use it – is disaggregated so you can map 1,291 subnational regions, or look at children, or female-headed households, or rural-urban areas, to see how the level of poverty and the overlaps across 10 indicators, vary. It’s a lot of information.

Next, we probed inequalities. We had some ethnicity data for 2.4 billion people in 41 countries – it’s not perfect, but the topic is too important to ignore. So, we disaggregated the already disturbing condition of multidimensional poverty by ethnic groups.

Disparity across these ethnic groups was astonishingly high – higher than across all 1,291 subnational regions. In Latin America, indigenous peoples stood out. For instance, in Bolivia indigenous communities account for about 44 percent of the population but 75 percent of multidimensionally poor people.

In Gabon and Nigeria, the disparity in poverty rates between ethnic groups spanned 70 percentage points. We did this study not to drum doom, but rather to shine light on ethnic disparities in the hopes that this will spark change.

Then there is gender. We know the vital importance of girls’ education in reducing undernutrition, child mortality, unemployment etc. So, we wanted to see how many of the 1.3 billion poor people don’t have an educated girl or woman in their household.

We used 6 years of schooling as our criterion. When the data came in, it gave us a start. Two-thirds of all multidimensionally poor people – 836 million – lack any educated girl or woman.

So, while there has been progress in poverty reduction, the road ahead is long. To understand more we peered inside the household, to look at boys and men in those households.

And we found that one-sixth of all multidimensionally poor people (215 million) live in households with an educated male, but no educated female – a daily disparity. But half the 1.3 billion MPI poor lacked any educated person. One meets these figures with a heavy heart.

To put that number into perspective, across the 4.6 billion people who were not poor, only 4.2 percent of them lack an educated person. Yes, nowadays we yearn to leapfrog, to expand digital reach. But distressing basics – of education, of nutrition – are still a real part of poverty ‘comorbidities’.

So, comorbidities and multidimensional poverty cover common ground. And just as the Charlston Comorbidity Index among others has been widely used, so too we hope that this uncomfortable profiling of multidimensional poverty, and of structural inequalities by ethnicity, age, place and gender, will contribute to what Pope Francis calls “a global movement against indifference” so that the picture we find from the data for the rest of this decade is not one of a poverty pandemic.

Sabina Alkire is Director, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative

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