Multidimensional poverty and livelihood strategies in rural Iran

Poverty alleviation is a global challenge that concerns particularly developing countries, and its reduction has been identified as the first Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Poverty is a multidimensional and place-oriented phenomenon that cannot be determined with monetary and strict indicators. It also is interrelated with many factors, including household livelihood strategies. Therefore, the main goals of this paper were (a) to introduce a local index to measure the multidimensional poverty situation of rural areas of Iran, (b) to introduce a proper index to evaluate the livelihood strategy of rural households (LSI), and (c) to investigate the relationship between poverty and livelihood strategy. This study uses the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) and a fuzzy approach to evaluate household poverty and livelihood strategy. A sample includes about 20 thousand rural households and was used in this regard. The results indicated that the value of MPI is 0.349, and about 45% of rural households are deprived in at least two-thirds of poverty indicators, and 62.5% of them live in deprived households. Education dimension had the highest contribution in MPI, the LSI value was 0.531, which means rural households often have integrated livelihood strategy, and rural households whose livelihood strategies were more dependent on agriculture also faced with higher poverty and deprivation scores. Finally, the elimination of rural poverty requires a smart approach that is both holistic and systematic.