Decoding Marginalisation: Insights into Social Exclusion and Inclusion

Every society has a centre and edges. The people at the centre enjoy access to jobs, healthcare, education, and political power. Those pushed to the edges – the margins – often go without these essentials. This process of pushing people out of the mainstream is called marginalisation. It is not just an abstract concept studied in textbooks; it shapes the daily reality of billions of people worldwide. Understanding what marginalisation really means, how it is measured, and why it keeps changing is essential for anyone who wants to build a more just and equitable world.

What does marginalisation actually mean? 🔗

The word “marginalisation” comes from “margin” – the blank space at the edge of a page, outside the main text. When applied to society, it describes a context-dependent social process where certain individuals or groups are systematically excluded from meaningful participation in the social, economic, political, and cultural life of their community. These groups are denied access to resources, decision-making power, and opportunities that others take for granted.

The European Commission defines this kind of exclusion as a situation where a person is prevented from contributing to and benefiting from economic and social progress. Whether it is a Dalit family in rural India unable to access clean drinking water, an indigenous community in Australia cut off from quality education, or an elderly person in Europe who cannot navigate online government services – the core experience is the same: being shut out from what should be available to everyone.

Marginalisation is not just about money 🔗

A common mistake is to equate marginalisation solely with poverty. While economic deprivation is a major factor, marginalisation operates across multiple dimensions simultaneously. According to Liberties.eu, there are three broad types of marginalisation that often overlap:

Social marginalisation occurs when people cannot access the same social opportunities as others. They may live in segregated communities, face discrimination in public spaces, or be excluded from cultural participation. This commonly affects ethnic minorities and can persist across generations.

Economic marginalisation means people lack equal chances to contribute to and benefit from the economy. They may not have access to good jobs, trade education, or even basic financial services. Without economic participation, they struggle to afford healthcare, decent housing, or nutrition.

Political marginalisation prevents people from having a voice in the decisions that affect their lives. If a community cannot vote freely, lacks representation in government, or has no platform to advocate for its needs, it is politically marginalised.

These forms of exclusion rarely exist in isolation. A person who is socially marginalised is very likely to be economically and politically marginalised as well. The barriers reinforce each other, creating a cycle that is extremely difficult to break without systemic intervention.

Who are the marginalised? 🔗

Marginalisation can affect anyone, but certain groups face it disproportionately due to deep-rooted historical and structural factors. These include people excluded on the basis of race, ethnicity, caste, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, religion, or geographic location.

Consider some examples. The industrial revolution denied many people – the poor, the uneducated, rural populations, the elderly, children, and women – equal access to the benefits of modern life. Many of these same groups continue to face exclusion today. Women of colour often experience what scholars call intersectional marginalisation – being sidelined not only because of gender but also because of racial or ethnic identity. Persons with disabilities face barriers in employment, education, and physical access to public spaces. Indigenous communities around the world continue to bear the lasting effects of colonialism, including loss of land, cultural suppression, and economic deprivation.

A scoping review published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications analysed 50 years of research and found that immigrants and minorities were the most frequently studied marginalised populations, while health was the most common topic associated with marginalisation. The review identified 12 distinct socially marginalised groups and 97 unique definitions of social marginalisation across the academic literature – highlighting just how broad and complex this phenomenon is.

How do we measure marginalisation? 🔗

If marginalisation is this complex and multi-layered, how do governments and international organisations figure out who is being left behind and how badly? While no single number can capture the full human experience of exclusion, experts have developed powerful measurement tools that go beyond just looking at income. Two of the most important are the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI).

The Human Development Index (HDI) 🔗

The HDI was developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in 1990 and is published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). It was built on a revolutionary idea: that “development” is not just about how rich a country is (its GDP), but about how its people are actually doing.

The HDI combines three key dimensions into a single score between 0 and 1:

A long and healthy life: measured by life expectancy at birth.
Access to knowledge: measured by expected years of schooling for children and mean years of schooling for adults.
A decent standard of living: measured by Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, adjusted for purchasing power.

Countries are then classified into four tiers – very high, high, medium, and low human development. When a country has a low HDI score, it signals that large portions of its population likely lack access to basic health, education, and economic stability – clear markers of widespread marginalisation.

According to the 2025 Human Development Report, global HDI progress has slowed to its weakest pace since 1990, excluding the crisis years of 2020-2021. The inequality gap between low-HDI and very-high-HDI countries has continued to widen for four consecutive years – a troubling sign that marginalisation at the global level is deepening, not shrinking.

The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 🔗

While the HDI gives us a country-level snapshot, the MPI takes things deeper. Developed in 2010 by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the UNDP, the MPI measures poverty not just by income, but by capturing the multiple deprivations a person faces simultaneously at the household level.

The MPI uses ten indicators grouped into three dimensions: health (nutrition and child mortality), education (years of schooling and school attendance), and living standards (cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, and assets). A household is considered “multidimensionally poor” if it is deprived in at least one-third of these weighted indicators.

This approach reveals a much wider picture of deprivation than income alone. According to the 2024 Global MPI report, about 1.1 billion out of 6.3 billion people across 112 countries live in acute multidimensional poverty. Over half of them are children under 18. Nearly 40 percent live in countries affected by violent conflict, which reverses or stalls progress on poverty reduction.

What makes the MPI especially useful for understanding marginalisation is its ability to show exactly how people are deprived. A family might have electricity and a paved floor but still lack clean water and have children out of school. This granular data helps governments and organisations target their interventions more effectively rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach.

The dynamic nature of marginalisation 🔗

One of the most important things to understand about marginalisation is that it is not static. It is a fluid, evolving process that changes with life stages, economic shifts, technological developments, and crises. As Springer’s encyclopaedia entry on marginalisation notes, older people in industrial societies are often marginalised when they are seen as lacking the capacity to function as independent agents – a social discourse rooted in stereotypes about ageing, not a medical reality.

Marginalisation changes across life stages 🔗

A person’s vulnerability to exclusion can shift dramatically as they age. A child born into poverty or a lower-caste family starts life at a disadvantage, lacking access to proper nutrition and quality education that would shape their entire future. A young adult from a marginalised community may face discrimination in the job market despite having qualifications. And an elderly person – even one who lived a stable, middle-class life – can become marginalised through loss of income after retirement, unaffordable healthcare, social isolation, or an inability to use digital technology in an increasingly online world.

Societal shifts create new forms of exclusion 🔗

Society itself is constantly changing, and these shifts can generate entirely new categories of marginalisation or intensify existing ones.

Economic shifts: When a major industry collapses – say, a factory town loses its only employer or an entire mining sector shuts down – an entire community of skilled workers can become economically marginalised overnight. Their skills become irrelevant, and they are left without livelihood or prospects.

Technological shifts: The rise of the internet and digital technology has created a powerful new form of exclusion: the digital divide. People without access to devices, internet connectivity, or digital literacy are increasingly shut out of education, employment, government services, and even social interaction. The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically accelerated this, as essential services moved online and those without digital access were left behind.

Crises and conflicts: Wars, natural disasters, and pandemics always hit the marginalised hardest. During COVID-19, low-wage “essential workers” had to risk their health on the job, gig economy workers lost their income instantly, and children without laptops or Wi-Fi were cut off from schooling entirely.

This dynamic nature of marginalisation is precisely why the World Bank defines social inclusion as an ongoing process – one of continuously improving the ability, opportunity, and dignity of disadvantaged people to take part in society. It is not a one-time fix.

From exclusion to inclusion: why ongoing effort matters 🔗

Understanding marginalisation is only the first step. The real goal is to move toward social inclusion – and that requires persistent, adaptive effort. Inclusion does not mean simply “allowing” marginalised groups to join the mainstream. It means fundamentally restructuring systems so they are accessible, fair, and welcoming to everyone by design.

The World Bank’s landmark report “Inclusion Matters” makes a critical point: deprivation arising from social exclusion tends to occur on multiple axes at once. A policy that addresses only one axis – say, improved access to education – will not, by itself, break the grip of exclusion if economic barriers, social discrimination, and political disempowerment remain intact. Effective inclusion requires coordinated action across all these dimensions simultaneously.

This is also why measurement tools like the HDI and MPI are so valuable. They do not just tell us that marginalisation exists – they help identify where it is concentrated, which dimensions are most acute, and whether progress is actually being made over time. When governments track these indicators, they can design more targeted interventions: building schools in regions where education deprivation is highest, expanding healthcare access where child mortality is concentrated, or investing in digital infrastructure where the digital divide is widest.

But here is the key takeaway: because society keeps changing – new technologies emerge, economies shift, populations age, crises hit – the work of countering marginalisation can never be considered “done.” Each generation faces new forms of exclusion, and each demands fresh solutions. The rise of artificial intelligence and automation, for example, is already raising concerns about a new wave of economic marginalisation for workers whose skills may become obsolete.

The bigger picture 🔗

Marginalisation is not just a problem for the marginalised. When large sections of a population are excluded from contributing their talents, ideas, and labour, the entire society suffers. Economic growth slows, social tensions rise, and political instability becomes more likely. The World Bank estimates that the global loss in human capital wealth due to gender inequality alone is around $160.2 trillion. That is the cost of marginalisation – not just in human suffering, but in unrealised potential for everyone.

Conversely, inclusion drives innovation, stability, and shared prosperity. When everyone has a fair shot at education, healthcare, and economic participation, societies become more productive, resilient, and peaceful. This is why organisations ranging from the United Nations to the World Bank have placed social inclusion at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

What do you think? In a world where technology is advancing rapidly and new forms of digital exclusion are emerging every day, what do you believe is the single most important step societies should take to ensure no one gets left behind? And can marginalisation ever truly be eliminated, or is it an inherent feature of how societies organise themselves?

References

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-04210-y
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_exclusion
3. https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/marginalization-and-being-marginalized/43767
4. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230627390_5
5. https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index
6. https://ourworldindata.org/human-development-index
7. https://www.undp.org/pacific/press-releases/human-development-progress-slows-35-year-low-according-un-development-programme-report
8. https://ourworldindata.org/multidimensional-poverty-index
9. https://hdr.undp.org/content/2024-global-multidimensional-poverty-index-mpi
10. https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_501-1
11. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/social-inclusion
12. https://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/10.1596/978-1-4648-0010-8_ch1
13. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2020/09/02/five-things-about-social-sustainability-and-inclusion
14. https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/2016/chapter1.pdf