electricsheepafrica/africa-zimbabwe-mpi

Zimbabwe Multidimensional Poverty Index

Publisher: Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative · Source: HDX · License: other-pd-nr · Updated: 2026-03-05

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Abstract

The global Multidimensional Poverty Index provides the only comprehensive measure available for non-income poverty, which has become a critical underpinning of the SDGs. The global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) measures multidimensional poverty in over 100 developing countries, using internationally comparable datasets and is updated annually. The measure captures the acute deprivations that each person faces at the same time using information from 10 indicators, which are grouped into three equally weighted dimensions: health, education, and living standards. Critically, the MPI comprises variables that are already reported under the Demographic Health Surveys (DHS), the Multi-Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) and in some cases, national surveys.

The subnational multidimensional poverty data from the data tables are published by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford. For the details of the global MPI methodology, please see the latest Methodological Notes found here.

Each row in this dataset represents country-level aggregates. Data was last updated on HDX on 2026-03-05. Geographic scope: ZWE.

Curated into ML-ready Parquet format by Electric Sheep Africa.

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Dataset Characteristics

Domain	Public health
Unit of observation	Country-level aggregates
Rows (total)	11
Columns	13 (5 numeric, 6 categorical, 0 datetime)
Train split	8 rows
Test split	2 rows
Geographic scope	ZWE
Publisher	Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative
HDX last updated	2026-03-05

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Variables

Geographic — country_iso3 (ZWE), admin_1_pcode (ZW10, ZW11, ZW12), admin_1_name (Bulawayo, Manicaland, Mashonaland Central), intensity_of_deprivation (range 40.2656–43.5102), vulnerable_to_poverty (range 10.5239–32.5826) and 2 others.

Temporal — start_date, end_date.

Outcome / Measurement — headcount_ratio (range 3.8109–44.1044).

Identifier / Metadata — esa_source (HDX), esa_processed (2026-04-05).

Other — mpi (range 0.0153–0.1913).

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Quick Start

from datasets import load_dataset

ds    = load_dataset("electricsheepafrica/africa-zimbabwe-mpi")
train = ds["train"].to_pandas()
test  = ds["test"].to_pandas()

print(train.shape)
train.head()

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Schema

Column	Type	Null %	Range / Sample Values
country_iso3	object	0.0%	ZWE
admin_1_pcode	object	9.1%	ZW10, ZW11, ZW12
admin_1_name	object	9.1%	Bulawayo, Manicaland, Mashonaland Central
mpi	float64	0.0%	0.0153 – 0.1913 (mean 0.1112)
headcount_ratio	float64	0.0%	3.8109 – 44.1044 (mean 26.121)
intensity_of_deprivation	float64	0.0%	40.2656 – 43.5102 (mean 42.1524)
vulnerable_to_poverty	float64	0.0%	10.5239 – 32.5826 (mean 26.2841)
in_severe_poverty	float64	0.0%	0.3947 – 13.636 (mean 6.8203)
survey	object	0.0%	MICS
start_date	datetime64[ns, UTC]	0.0%
end_date	datetime64[ns, UTC]	0.0%
esa_source	object	0.0%	HDX
esa_processed	object	0.0%	2026-04-05

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Numeric Summary

Column	Min	Max	Mean	Median
mpi	0.0153	0.1913	0.1112	0.1204
headcount_ratio	3.8109	44.1044	26.121	28.6203
intensity_of_deprivation	40.2656	43.5102	42.1524	42.5813
vulnerable_to_poverty	10.5239	32.5826	26.2841	29.5363
in_severe_poverty	0.3947	13.636	6.8203	7.0836

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Curation

Raw data was downloaded from HDX via the CKAN API and converted to Parquet. Column names were lowercased and standardised to snake_case. Common missing-value markers (N/A, null, none, -, unknown, no data, #N/A) were unified to NaN. 2 column(s) were cast from string to numeric or datetime based on parse-success rate (>85% threshold). The dataset was split 80/20 into train and test partitions using a fixed random seed (42) and saved as Snappy-compressed Parquet.

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Limitations

• Data originates from Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative and has not been independently validated by ESA.
• Automated cleaning cannot correct for misreported values, definitional inconsistencies, or sampling bias in the original collection.
• Refer to the original HDX dataset page for the publisher's own methodology notes and caveats.

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Citation

@dataset{hdx_africa_zimbabwe_mpi,
  title     = {Zimbabwe Multidimensional Poverty Index},
  author    = {Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://data.humdata.org/dataset/zimbabwe-mpi},
  note      = {Repackaged for machine learning by Electric Sheep Africa (https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica)}
}

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Electric Sheep Africa — Africa's ML dataset infrastructure. Lagos, Nigeria.