Proportion of population living in households with access to basic services (PV_POP_BS)

Proportion of population living in households with access to basic services

This indicator measure levels of accessibility to basic services and guide the efforts of governments for provision of equitable basic services for all to eradicate poverty.

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Rationale

Poverty has many dimensions. While people living in poverty experience a lack of insufficient monetary resources, they often also experience deprivations of essential services which reduces opportunities for the realization of their rights. Some of these dimensions are part of individual or household consumption while others are public services, the availability of which can only be measured at the community level.

Among the different aspects of poverty, this indicator focuses on ‘access to basic services’. Providing access to basic services such as safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, sustainable energy and mobility, housing, education, healthcare, etc. helps to improve the quality of life of the poor. Adequate basic service delivery systems promote socio-economic improvements and help to achieve economic growth, social inclusion and equality. More specifically, improved basic services can help to raise well-being and productivity of communities, create jobs, save time and human effort in transporting water, support food security, better use of energy, production of essential commodities, improve health and enhance the level of education.

In the Quito implementation plan for the New Urban Agenda (NUA), adopted in the Habitat III conference, member states committed to “promoting equitable and affordable access to sustainable basic physical and social infrastructure for all, without discrimination. They further committed to “ensuring that these services are responsive to the rights and needs of women, children and youth, older persons and persons with disabilities, migrants, indigenous peoples and local communities, as appropriate, and to those of others in vulnerable situations.”

Basic service delivery must be appropriate for the local needs – and hence able to respond to the concept of “access for all” – as stated in the NUA. Basic services are fundamental to improving living standards, and governments have the responsibility for their provision.

Concepts

The following key concepts were defined to support the indicator in the context of poverty eradication. Basic Services refer to public service provision systems that meet human basic needs including:

-Drinking water
-Sanitation and hygiene
-Energy
-Mobility
-Waste collection
-Health care
-Education
-Information technologies

Access to each of these basic services implies that sufficient and affordable service is reliably available with adequate quality.

Limitations

Concerned stakeholders and authorities around the world have different local interpretations of what constitutes as a basic service. Thus, definitions available for many other SDG indicators are used to construct this one. For example, elements of basic services are measured under SDG indicators 3.7.1 (health), 4.1.1 (education), 6.1.1 (water), 6.2.1 (sanitation), 7.1.1 (energy), 11.2.1 (public transport), etc.

Finally, many countries still have limited capacities for data management, data collection and monitoring, and continue to struggle with limited data on large or densely populated geographical areas. This means that complementarity in data reporting in a few exceptions is needed to ensure that both national and global figures achieve consistencies in the final reported data for access to basic services.

Computation Method

There are two computation stages that can be applied depending on the level at which data are collected.

Step 1: Finding the proportion of the population that have access to ALL the basic services mentioned above from primary data sources such as household surveys and census. This step is essential when countries have primary data at the household levels for all the types of basic services.

Step 2: Computations of metrics for other components that are not measured at the household level such as access to health, education, transport, etc. For example, access to mobility for households is measured through GIS data rather than household survey. Individual components of access to basic services are computed first, followed by an aggregation of the components (using equal weighting).

Having an aggregated value showing access to ALL the basic services works as the best measure to inform policies of regions where the most deprivations are prevalent but such a summary measure hides what is happening with each component and it makes policy conclusions difficult. Instead, it is the individual component measures that point rightly to areas of improvements or investments.

Disaggregation

Data for this indicator can be disaggregated at the city and town levels.
– Disaggregation by urban /rural
– Disaggregation by gender
– Disaggregation by age
– Disaggregation by formal/informal settlements