Pamela Cox, Guest Writer

Mary is a six-year-old girl living in rural Jamaica. She has four brothers and sisters, and her mother is an illiterate widow who earns about US$180 per month as a subsistence farmer. What are Mary's chances of becoming a prominent lawyer or a university professor? Not very high, and certainly a lot lower than those of Peter, a six-year-old boy growing up in Kingston with two parents in his home, both with a secondary education and a good income, and only one sister.

Opportunities for these two children are unequal from the outset. Their reality is a common one in many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, in spite of the fact that poverty in the region is down, thanks to five years of faster growth and smarter social policy. Slowly - too slowly - but undeniably, the percentage of poor people in Latin America and the Caribbean has at long last begun to fall. This has shifted the policy debate from poverty towards inequality, something to be expected in a region where the richest 10 per cent captures 40 per cent of total income, while the poorest 10 per cent receives a mere one per cent.

Inequality discussions

Up until now, discussions about inequality have usually centred on income, in part because we have never been able to measure inequality of opportunity - in Latin America, the Caribbean, or anywhere else. This is about to change. A team of experts assembled by the World Bank has developed a 'Human Opportunity Index' (HOI) which captures the availability of opportunities in a country and how those opportunities are distributed among citizens.

This composite index, based on data representing 200 million children and spanning roughly the last decade, captures coverage in basic services such as education, water, sanitation, electricity, but also equity of the coverage in the 19 largest Latin American and