Poverty reduction has been at the heart of our work since our establishment. While it is deeply disheartening that poverty persists across the region despite over five decades of poverty alleviation efforts, this makes abundantly clear the need to more effectively target poverty alleviation policies and programmes. Since poverty incidence and severity are disproportionately higher in the mountain areas in almost all the HKH countries, a clear improvement to assist more effective poverty alleviation would address mountain specificities including analysis of the influence of geographic, socio-economic, environmental and cultural factors as well as demographic characteristics.

Poverty assessments are both income and multidimensional but even the more complex multidimensional assessments do not allow us to target and design effectively. Coupled with other problems such as inadequate data, information, and knowledge about the nature, causes, incidence and severity of mountain poverty, alleviating poverty as envisioned by the global community in the SDGs has remained a major challenge in the HKH region.

Realizing the serious gaps in knowledge and understanding about mountain poverty, we undertook a comprehensive assessment of poverty in the HKH region using both an income (consumption) based approach and a multidimensional approach in analysing. While conventional multidimensional poverty indices use three dimensions of poverty (health, education, and living conditions) we added two more dimensions – inaccessibility and access to resources and services – to capture mountain specificities. We used nationally representative household survey data of different periods and different surveys. Where survey data are not available, we used published reports by government, development agencies and research reports to assess the status and trends of poverty, to analyse causes and drivers and to examine HKH government poverty alleviation policies and programmes.