Poverty Measurement: What’s Gender Got to do with it? Findings from Fiji: Part 1

This short paper reports on planned research in Fiji, the first country in the Pacific to pilot a measure of poverty at an individual level from a gender perspective.

Pacific Island countries report a high incidence of poverty among women and girls and especially the vulnerability of female-headed households. The percentage of households headed by women is still used as a proxy indicator of the feminisation of poverty. While household-level data give a good indication of the number of female-headed households contributing to feminisation of poverty discourse across the world and in Pacific region, it fails to reveal the extent of poverty among women and men within poor households.

Most household and income expenditure surveys across the Pacific are referred to the household head. Existing poverty studies do not capture the make-up and dynamics of households in terms of intra-household allocation and distribution of resources around 'who controls what and who gets what'. This new research seeks to assess the situation of individuals, to provide accurate sex-disaggregated data on poverty.