PUTRAJAYA should set up a national poverty commission for better coordination of poverty relief programmes to get the most out of every sen spent on helping the needy, said academics.

Such a national body will be able to review policies and centralise the collection of data on the true extent of hardship faced by different groups such as urban and rural residents, Orang Asli and migrant workers.

This will allow a more effective and efficient use of public funds to help these groups as currently, government spending on poverty is spread over about 100 different federal and state programmes, according to a United Nations report.

The lack of a central agency also means that despite the vast amounts of money spent on fighting poverty, there is no telling how effective these schemes have been, they said.

Prof Mohd Yusof Kasim of Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) said in his study on poverty, the many agencies with specific programmes did not coordinate with each other and this resulted in duplication.

“The effectiveness of these agencies are in question. The way they spend money is not cost efficient because there are too many agencies involved,” said Yusof during a webinar featuring UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Phillip Alston.

“And there is duplication in terms of agencies and programmes, sometimes in one place,” said Yusof, who advocated a revised method of measuring poverty and a review of current policies.

After the release of Alston’s report on poverty in Malaysia, Putrajaya yesterday released a revised poverty threshold of RM2,208 per household per month which puts the number of poor Malaysian households at 405,411 or 5.6% of the population.

The new poverty line income (PLI) was a revision from the previous RM980 per household per month, which gave a rate of 0.4% that experts said was artificially low, given Malaysia’s status as an upper-middle income nation.

Yusof said anti-poverty policies should be focused on the bottom 10% to 20% of the population and there should not be too many agencies involved.

“This is the role of a poverty commission. Poverty must not be addressed by separate ministries but by a national agency. Otherwise we spend all this money but do not have good results.”

Alston, who had recently published his report on poverty, echoed this observation, adding that despite the many programmes to tackle hardship, there is a lack of means to measure how effective they are.

“There is a sense that there are too many programmes set up to tick a box. (The attitude is) we have to do something about this so we set up a programme.

“But no one cares about whether the programme hits the necessary target and does so in the best possible way. We spent ‘x’ million ringgit on a programme but what do we have to show for it?

In his report, Alston found that despite the more than 100 poverty reduction programmes in Malaysia, its social protection system is “fragmented, inadequate, underfunded and poorly targeted”.

“Most importantly, as Unicef has noted, the system has ‘virtually no redistributive or poverty reduction impact’, the report said.

“That is because of inadequate investment, expenditure failing to keep pace with GDP growth and schemes that provide only small irregular benefits.” – July 11, 2020.