Finding the COVID-induced “new poor” in Bangladesh

The “new poor” is a vulnerable group in Bangladesh that was staying afloat with steady livelihoods before COVID-19 but has undergone a substantial financial plight since the pandemic hit and struggled to recover. The identification of the “new poor” has been largely dominated by traditional income-based measures, which miss the multidimensional aspects of experiencing new poverty as well as the distinct nature of relativity where their poverty during/after the pandemic is relative to households’ own condition before the pandemic. While qualitative approaches are more suited to identifying “who the poor are”, there remains a scarcity of such explorations for the “new poor”. This paper will narrate how we took an alternative qualitative longitudinal approach and applied it in practice to build five indicators from the ground to find the “new poor”.