Measuring Refugee Poverty Using Deprivation Versus Income: The Case of Afghans in Iran

Background. Escape from home countries due to a well-founded fear of persecution is usually abrupt and concurrent with loss of physical and social assets for refugees, a situation predisposing many to poverty. Arrival to safety and living under the protection of host communities is also parallel with experiencing multiple deprivations for most refugees, as the majority (86% worldwide) live in developing countries with limited resources (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, [UNHCR], 2016a). Limited studies in this field affirm high rates of poverty among some groups of refugees (Alloush, Gonzalez, Gupta, Rojas, & Taylor, 2016; Chaaban et al., 2010; UNHCR, 2016b). This study is among the first attempts to compute poverty among one of the world’s largest refugee populations in exile, Afghans in Iran. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ latest global trend report, one in every eight refugees worldwide is from Afghanistan and around 40 percent of this population resides in Iran (UNHCR, 2016a). More importantly, this study is among the first to compare three major deprivation measurement approaches to provide a more comprehensive perspective on refugees’ poverty.

Methods. We estimate poverty based on well-being using cross-sectional data collected in 2011 through convenience sampling from 2,034 Afghan refugee households in Iran. We utilize the United Nations Development Fund’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI),which calculates poverty at the household level in three dimensions: (1) education, which encompasses years of schooling for adults and whether children are currently enrolled in school; (2) health, which encompasses malnutrition and child mortality; and (3) standards of living, encompassing the household’s access to electricity, water, sanitation, cooking fuel, whether the home has a dirt floor, and the household’s access to assets related to information, mobility, and livelihood (UNDP, 2015). The MPI total score ranges from 0-100%, with scores of 33.3% or higher indicating the household is living in multidimensional poverty. Moreover, we calculate Afghan households’ income poverty based on the Iranian national money-metric poverty line by utilizing the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) poverty measurements. FGT is a class of poverty measures that calculates poverty rates based on a specific poverty line, number of total population, and poverty aversion or poverty distribution-sensitivity. Furthermore, we calculate Afghan refugees’ extreme poverty rate based on the World Bank’s poverty line of USD 1.25 per person per day at 2011 purchasing power parity. 

Results. Around 27% of the surveyed Afghan households in this study were multi-dimensionally poor, close to 51% of them lived under the national income poverty line, and 1% of the Afghan refugees were extremely poor. More importantly, findings show that more than 67% of the multi-dimensionally poor or deprived households were not income poor; further, nearly 37% of the out-of-school children between the ages of seven and twelve, and over 80% of the malnourished Afghans, did not live in income poor households.

Conclusions and Implications. These findings call for further attention to measurement techniques and indicators that service providers or policy makers use to assess refugees’ vulnerability for better targeting of service delivery and fund allocation.