This gender-sensitive data tool could revolutionise the fight against poverty

Currently, we measure the poverty of households, not individuals, but the reality is that an elderly grandmother and her twenty-year-old grandson living under the same roof experience deprivation in different ways and to different degrees. Right now, we don’t capture those differences, hiding inequalities within the home and making it harder to target policies and programs to the world's poor. The Australian Government has invested $9.5 million in a new gender-sensitive poverty metric, the Individual Deprivation Measure (IDM), which aims to address data gaps and improve policy, not just by measuring at the individual level, but also by assessing poverty on multiple dimensions beyond money, including access to food, clothing, family planning, and freedom from violence.