Time-series analysis of Ghana's multidimensional poverty drivers (2022–2025) using official Ghana Statistical Service data — Python, pandas, matplotlib.
# Ghana Multidimensional Poverty: Trends & Drivers (2022–2025)
**A national-development time-series analysis — Python, pandas, matplotlib — using official Ghana Statistical Service data to identify what's actually driving poverty in Ghana, and whether it's improving.**
## Business/policy context
Ghana measures poverty two ways: monetary poverty (income-based) and **multidimensional poverty (MPI)** — a broader measure capturing whether households are deprived across 13 indicators spanning living conditions, health, education, and employment. A person is classified as multidimensionally poor if they're deprived in at least a third of the weighted indicators. This is the more policy-actionable of the two measures, because it points directly at *which* deprivation to fix, not just *how many* people are poor.
This project analyzes the **quarterly indicator-level breakdown** GSS publishes — specific deprivation rates across 13 indicators (health insurance, sanitation, nutrition, housing, etc.) tracked every quarter from **2022 Q1 to 2025 Q3** — to answer: *is poverty improving, and if so, which specific deprivations are driving the change?*
**Dataset:** Figure 4.2 from the GSS's 2024 Q1–2025 Q3 Multidimensional Poverty Report — 14 quarters × 13 individual deprivation indicators, published January 2026.
## A note on data provenance
Like the companion NEET project in this portfolio, this data was **manually transcribed** from an official GSS PDF table (not scraped or downloaded as CSV, since GSS does not publish one for this figure) and validated: the transcribed Q3 2025 overall MPI incidence (21.9%) was checked against the report's own stated headline figure (21.9%) and matches exactly.
## Business/research questions answered
1. Has Ghana's multidimensional poverty rate improved or worsened since 2022?
2. Which specific deprivation is currently the single biggest driver of poverty?
3. Which deprivations have improved the most (and least) since 2022?
4. Are there a …