Multidimensional Poverty Assessment among Adolescent Children in the Mouhoun Region of Burkina Faso, West Africa

Poverty is complex and multidimensional and particularly pronounced in children living in semi-arid West Africa. Unfortunately, few studies have addressed multidimensional child poverty in this region. Using novel data generated from 431 randomly selected households in the Boucle du Mouhoun region in Burkina Faso, the Alkire–Foster methodology was applied to estimate and decompose multidimensional poverty among adolescent children. Ten dimensions guided by the child poverty literature, data availability and the country’s SDGs were used. While deprivations in water and sanitation (89%), health (75%), nutrition (82%), and child labour (48.7%) were found to be more prevalent in the rural areas, child subjective well-being (73%) and child protection (61%) were more pronounced in the urban areas. Analysis of multiple overlaps in dimensions shows that all of the children suffer from deprivations in three or more dimensions simultaneously. Furthermore, when the poverty cut-off values were set at k = 20% (“Vulnerable to Poverty”), k = 30% (“Multidimensionally Poor”) and k = 50% (“Poverty Severity”), close to 95% of children are categorized as being in “Severe Poverty”, 68% as “Multidimensionally Poor”, and 38% as being “Vulnerable to Poverty”. Using binary logistic regressions, household size, age and marital status of household head, locality of child, income source, debt status, education, number of siblings, gender of child, adults and maternal health condition were found to be significantly correlated to poverty vulnerability, multidimensionally poor and poverty severity in the region. The implications of these findings for multidimensional child poverty targeted policies and interventions are discussed.