Research summary
Antipoverty policies assume that targeting poor households is enough to reach poor individuals. But this isn’t always the case. For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, roughly three-quarters of underweight women and undernourished children don’t live in the poorest 20 per cent of households. Furthermore, in countries where undernutrition is a significant problem, there is an even higher share of undernourished individuals living in non-poor households.
Dr. Caitlin Brown, Canada Research Chair in Inequality, Undernutrition, and Anti-Poverty Policy in Developing Countries, aims to understand the complex relationships between undernutrition, poverty and intra-household inequality. She and her research team are exploring the role that sanitation-related infrastructure plays in nutritional outcomes and in food safety practices in urban street-food markets. Ultimately, their goal is to improve the identification of poor individuals in large populations and develop more targeted and effective anti-poverty policies in developing countries.