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From Schooling to Learning: Improving Education Data in Multidimensional Poverty Metrics
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DOI：10.1007/s11205-026-03885-x.png)
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Abstract
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Education is both intrinsically valuable and instrumental to achieving a range of capabilities. It is a core dimension of the global and nearly 40 national Multidimensional Poverty Indices (MPIs), which typically rely on indicators of school attendance and educational attainment. While foundational, these measures may fail to capture whether individuals acquire basic cognitive skills, potentially leading to an under-identification of educational deprivation. This paper proposes two sets of improvements to education data collection through household surveys. The most substantive and innovative proposal consists of introducing a minimum cognitive skills assessment (MCSA), to be administered to all children and to the most educated adult of the household, whenever he or she has not completed a tertiary or university degree. The proposed tool for children consists of the ASER test for those aged 8-12 and an analogous adaptive instrument for those aged 13-17. The selected adult would be assessed in basic reading and through a small set of health and financial literacy tasks. Recognising the practical constraints of household surveys, the paper outlines full, intermediate, and minimal implementation alternatives, the latter including only a fluency test for children and a basic reading assessment for adults. Second, the paper proposes improvements in the measurement of school participation, progression, and attainment, drawing on MICS questionnaires. The proposals are designed to remain feasible within the operational constraints of multi-topic household surveys. Advancing along these lines would strengthen the identification of educational deprivation and improve the robustness and policy relevance of multidimensional poverty measurement.
Keywords:
Multidimensional poverty
Education deprivation
Foundational cognitive skills
Household surveys
Learning poverty
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