Malawi needs at least 74 years to eradicate its poverty at the rate it is going; a study by Oxford University has shown.

The study comes at a time when the national poverty rate is at 50.7 percent, according to the Third Integrated Household Survey (IHS3) indicating that almost half of the population is poor.

This means that with life expectancy at 52 years, all Malawians currently alive may die before they see prosperity.

The study the Multidimensional Poverty Index or MPI covering 22 countries was carried out by Dr Sabina Alkire and Dr Jose Manuel Roche from the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).

The index measures reductions in multidimensional poverty – overlapping deprivations in health, education and living standards – rather than income.

Accor d ing to the study, Nepal, Rwanda and Bangladesh were the ‘star performers’ of the 22-country study, with the largest absolute reductions in multidimensional poverty, followed by Ghana, Tanzania, Cambodia and Bolivia.

The release of OPHI’s findings on changes in poverty follows the publication of the MPI in the UN Development Programme’s flagship Human Development Report (HDR) for 2013.

The global MPI, which was developed by OPHI and the UNDP in 2010, has been published in the HDR ever since, and assesses multidimensional poverty in 104 countries for which data are available.

The ability of the MPI to reveal inequalities at a regional level, as well as between social groups, makes it a vital tool for policy makers.

“Using this measure, we found that reductions in intensity – the percentage of deprivations people experience at the same time – were strongest in relatively poorer countries such as Ethiopia, Malawi and Senegal,” said Alkire, who is OPHI Director.

“This highlights the vital importance of using MPI, not just the percentage of poor people, to incentivize and celebrate progress and provide a more balanced picture of poverty even in the poorest places.”

According to the study, if the study’s star countries, Nepal, Rwanda, and Bangladesh, continue to reduce poverty at the current rate, they will halve MPI in less than 10 years and eradicate it in 20. However, the picture in other countries looks much less positive.

“At the current rate of reduction, it will take Ethiopia 45 years to halve multidimensional poverty; in other words, to achieve poverty levels equivalent to those Nigeria has now,” said OPHI’s Dr José Manuel Roche, who calculated the predictions.

“Based on the same assumptions, it will take India 41 years and Malawi 74 years to eradicate acute poverty as measured by the MPI. But we hope that by providing a more complete and balanced picture, these measures will help spur the eradication of multidimensional poverty,” he added. According to IHS3, 25 percent of the Malawian population is ultra poor meaning about one in every four people lives in dire poverty such that they cannot even afford to meet the minimum standard for daily-recommended food requirement.