The health indicators in the Multidimensional Poverty Index focus on nutrition and child mortality. While this simplicity might be intentional - designed to enable cross-country comparability and reliance on ‘measurable’ proxies of deprivation - it can overlook important aspects of wellbeing. Nutrition is assessed using Body Mass Index for adults and height-for-age or weight-for-height for children. A household is marked as deprived if even one member is undernourished. 

The child in this photograph shows flag hair, a visible clinical sign of protein deficiency caused by repeated periods of food scarcity. Yet, because the child’s height and weight fall within the “normal” range, the MPI would classify them as nutritionally adequate.