In three months, the UN looks set to adopt 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) that will guide the international community’s efforts to tackle global poverty, inequality and climate change over the next 15 years.

After years of negotiations among policymakers, NGOs and academics , a zero draft of the SDGs is now under discussion. But how will we know if we advance towards achieving these targets? What should be the indicators of progress?

The draft goals call for an end to poverty “in all its forms everywhere” and set the target of reducing “at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions”. But how do countries measure the multidimensional nature of poverty and track progress towards reducing it?

Multidimensional poverty measurement has been rapidly evolving over the past five years, both at the national and international level. Since 2010, the UN Development Programme’s human development report office has published a Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), developed with and calculated by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford.

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The index complements traditional measures of monetary poverty and captures the multiple, overlapping disadvantages poor people can face – such as poor sanitation, malnutrition, poor quality of housing and lack of education.

According to the latest updates of the Global MPI, released by OPHI on 22 June and covering 101 developing countries, 1.6 billion people are living in multidimensional poverty around the world.

Of this number, most MPI poor people – 69.6% – live in middle-income countries. In addition, looking at the 67 countries for which there is comparable data on both MPI and monetary poverty, 29% or 1.4 billion people are MPI poor, while 1.07 billion or 22% live on less than $1.25 a day.

In certain countries, including Mexico, Pakistan and Egypt, the number of those living in multidimensional poverty is twice the number who are living on less than $1.25 a day, and is more than 1 million people. This emphasises how the MPI complements monetary poverty measures, as both together better capture the true reality of poverty.

This month more than 100 policymakers and senior officials came together in Cartagena, Colombia, for the third annual meeting of the Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network (MPPN), a group of more than 40 governments and institutions that promotes the use of national multidimensional poverty measures.

In a communique released after the meeting, which was hosted by President Juan Manuel Santos and the government of Colombia, theparticipants called for an improved Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI 2015+) to be included in the SDGs.

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This index would reflect progress towards tackling different dimensions of poverty, and could also be broken down to show exactly what poverty is like in different areas of a country, or among different groups of the population. Such information would help ensure that no one is left behind by the post-2015 development agenda.

The network supports governments designing national MPIs using indicators of poverty that are relevant to their specific country contexts. The governments of Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Bhutan, as well as the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, have already adopted official multidimensional poverty measures. And a rapidly increasing number of countries, including Pakistan, Philippines, Malaysia, Tunisia and Vietnam, are developing their own MPIs.

What is electric is how these measures galvanise action. By pinpointing exactly how and where people are poor, national MPIs enable governments to better target their resources and combat poverty more effectively through integrated and well-coordinated policy interventions.

The MPPN hopes that the global and national MPIs will receive support at the UN’s conference on financing for development in Addis Ababa next month. It also hopes the MPIs will be recommended as indicators by the expert group that recently concluded its first meeting on the indicator framework in New York.

How we understand poverty is changing – its multidimensional nature is now widely acknowledged. But recognising this fact in the SDGs is, in itself, not enough. We must commit to measuring multidimensional poverty to ensure that the many overlapping disadvantages faced by the poor can be energetically and successfully tackled.