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It is important to know who the minority groups are in specific country contexts and across borders. This information might not be readily available from official statistics. Some minority groups may be invisible in such statistics, while other groups may dispute the official measurements of their populations (usually as under-counted). An independent assessment could provide a more accurate picture of the number, geographical distribution and identity of the different minority groups. This may help to reveal inequalities in distribution of resources (especially if minorities are geographically concentrated) and gaps in existing statistics. This Guide provides useful tools for collecting data on minority groups, including information on how to engage minorities in the data collection process (see especially Tool 4).
Cooperation with national statistics offices could build capacity for data collection and encourage dialogue on concerns that may arise from changes in data collection procedures (e.g. concerns over privacy law).
In some cases, it may be difficult to discern distinct identities, or to understand which minority groups are also indigenous peoples. The official recognition of some groups may not be congruent with self-identification. However, international law favours self-identification, rather than state recognition, as a key indicator of minority (or indigenous) status.
It is generally agreed that poverty and human deprivation encompass much more than the purely economic dimensions of human welfare. In order to identify which groups are most in need of government policy and programmatic support, an Inclusion Index is being developed, that combines indicators on poverty (economic exclusion), health and education levels and disparities in political voice to measure the relative status of the different social groups in Nepal.
The Index is a work in progress. It looks at economic exclusion (measured by % of a given group falling below the poverty line), human development (measured by school participation rate among 6-14 year old children, % of 20-29 aged population who have graduated from high school, stunting rate among children under 5, under-weight rate among children under 5), and political exclusion (measured by membership in the civil service, current teachers, local level government officials from the 1999 election). All data is disaggregated by sex and caste/ethnic groups (the small ones have been clustered together).
This work is in line with the Government of Nepal’s three-year interim plan, which has made a commitment to further develop a Poverty Monitoring Analysis System and use it to track progress on reducing income poverty, as well as disparities in education, health and political voice between men and women and different social group. In order to do so, it is necessary to develop a standardized manner of clustering the 103 different social groups found in the 2001 Census. Preliminary findings of this work, which has been carried out in collaboration with the National Planning Commission, have ranked the caste/ethnic groups for each of the three indices. The work continues to develop the composite index for measuring exclusion. DFID and the World Bank are supporting this initiative. |
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