Examination of Poverty in Northern Mozambique: A Comparison of Social and Economic Dimensions

Sub-Saharan African countries have demonstrated high economic growth in the last decade. However, it seems that economic growth has not always contributed to poverty reduction in Sub Saharan Africa, as found in previous studies at regional or country levels. Mozambique is not an exception. The average economic growth rate of real GDP between 2000 and 2013 was 6.76%, whereas the poverty headcount rates in rural areas did not decrease in the same period. However, this was found based on economic measures of poverty, such as consumption-based or income-based poverty. It is often said that poverty is multidimensional and economic measures alone cannot represent the real situations of the poor. This is true especially when most of the population is engaged in subsistence agriculture. Then, the next questions will be how non-economic measures of or multidimensional poverty have changed in the same period and what the differently estimated determinants of poverty are. In this paper, poverty incidence based on non-economic and multidimensional measures of poverty were explored after 2003 in northern Mozambique where severe poverty was detected in previous studies, and major determinants of three types of poverty were investigated. Analyses were made based on the survey which was conducted in northern Mozambique for small-scale farmers in 2010 by the JICA Research Institute. As a result, multidimensional poverty in rural areas appears to have decreased in the given period. Concerning determinants of poverty, positive effects of household size and negative effects of the share of literate household members on poverty are quite robust for any type of poverty; the feminization of poverty was not clearly detected in northern Mozambique.