The Development and Resilience Research Monitor (DRRM) joins this DRRM series with a simple question: what do we mean when we say that someone is poor in Seychelles? The answer is not one number. It depends on the yardstick, the year of the data and whether we are measuring income, spending, living conditions or assets.
Poverty is a comparison, not a character label
In statistics, an income-poverty line is a threshold. A household below it has resources judged insufficient for a defined standard of living. A national line is designed for the country’s own prices, needs and social context. An international line, such as the World Bank’s purchasing-power-parity line, is mainly for comparing countries. It is not a substitute for a Seychelles-specific cost-of-living assessment.
There is also a difference between absolute and relative poverty. Absolute poverty asks whether people can reach a defined minimum. Relative poverty asks whether their resources fall substantially below the living standard typical in the same society. Both can be useful in a small island state where people may have electricity, schooling and health access yet still be unable to participate in ordinary social and economic life.
What Seychelles has measured
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) lists a Poverty Profile Report for 2017–2018, a Household Budget Survey collection and a Poverty and Equity Assessment among its social-statistics publications [NBS social statistics]. The World Bank’s indicator page says its inequality and poverty series are built from primary household surveys supplied by national statistical agencies, and shows Seychelles observations through 2018 for several indicators [World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform indicators]. These dates matter: a 2017–2018 estimate describes that survey period, not household conditions in October 2026.
A newer survey should not be assumed to have produced a final poverty rate merely because fieldwork has taken place. A 13 June 2026 report in The Seychelles Nation quoted NBS saying that the recently completed HBS 2024–2025 would update the national poverty rate, with World Bank technical assistance. That report describes the exercise and briefing; it is not itself the NBS results release. DRRM therefore does not present a current national poverty percentage without the published NBS methodology and estimate. That is not a gap to fill with guesswork; it is a reason to label the evidence honestly.
Income, expenditure and equivalisation
Household surveys may ask about wages, self-employment, pensions, transfers and other income. They may also measure what households spend or consume. Expenditure can sometimes give a steadier picture than income when earnings fluctuate, but it can miss unmet needs: a family may spend little because it is postponing healthcare, eating less well or relying on help. Income can miss the value of goods received in kind and can be difficult to report accurately.
Household size changes the meaning of a rupee total. A four-person household does not need exactly four times the resources of one person because some costs are shared, while children and adults have different needs. Equivalised income or expenditure applies a scale to reflect household size and composition. A poverty result based on per-person resources is therefore not automatically comparable with one based on an equivalence scale. Any careful reading of the next NBS estimate should ask which welfare concept, price base, recall period and equivalence scale were used.
Poverty can be multidimensional
Money is only one route to wellbeing. The Seychelles Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), developed by the Poverty Alleviation Department and NBS with technical support from the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, considers simultaneous deprivations rather than income alone [NBS MPI publication page]. The Seychelles pilot MPI comprises four dimensions—living standards, health, education and employment—and 13 indicators, according to the technical report hosted by OPHI [Seychelles MPI pilot technical report]. A person can therefore be income-poor without being MPI-poor, or face serious deprivation that an income measure does not show.
A 2025 African Development Bank country diagnostic reports very low basic-needs and extreme-poverty shares for 2023 and separately cites a 2018 Gini coefficient of 32.1 [AfDB Seychelles Country Diagnostic Note]. Those are useful signposts, but they are not interchangeable measures: the diagnostic’s MPI figures, an income-distribution statistic and an NBS household-budget estimate answer different questions. Readers should also check the underlying release before treating a secondary report as a new official poverty survey.
A practical DRRM definition
For this series, DRRM defines poverty in Seychelles as having insufficient command over the resources and services needed to meet an agreed minimum standard of living and to participate in society, measured for a specified year and method. That definition keeps the person in view while protecting the statistic from false precision.
It also points to better questions. Is the household below a national basic-needs line? Is it deprived in several MPI dimensions? Is its income temporarily low, or are low assets and insecure work making hardship persistent? Does a household’s apparent income stretch across several adults and children? A credible answer will identify the measure, date and unit before announcing the result. In Seychelles, defining poverty carefully is not a technical footnote. It is the first act of fair reporting.
Updated 23 October 2026. Figures and definitions are dated in the text; no current poverty rate is inferred where a final NBS release is not available.