Poverty Revisited: The Capability Approach Operationalized in Mozambique

This book deploys Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach to re-evaluate and estimate multidimensional poverty in Mozambique. Sen's conceptual notion of poverty as unfreedom is applied in three ways: firstly, to critique the official unidimensional consumption based poverty measure adopted in PARPA, Mozambique's Poverty Reduction Action Plan. Secondly, to assess whether sufficient "real opportunity freedoms" have been created for Mozambicans through PARPA's policy design, by analysing key socio-political and economic indicators publicly available for the country; and thirdly, to re-estimate multidimensional poverty, by utilizing the Alkire-Foster Method of the Multidimensional Poverty Index, re-adopted and tailored for the Mozambican case. The book demonstrates how Sen's normative notion of poverty as unfreedom can be operationalised in Mozambique to generate a deeper understanding of the manifestations of poverty.