This paper examines the Multidimensional Poverty Index jointly developed by OPHI and UNDP for the case of eighteen Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. The MPI is designed to be internationally comparable and to capture acute poverty. For these reasons, it provides relative low levels of poverty in the LAC region which, although being a message of hope, it can puzzle civil society and even NGOs and government agencies working on poverty reduction programmes. Simultaneously many governments in the region are incorporating multidimensional poverty measures as official ones. Thus, there seems to be scope and need for a multidimensional poverty measure that allows comparability across countries in the region, yet captures a ‘second layer’ of poverty (beyond the acute one). We consider alternative adjustments that could be done to the MPI to satisfy the above requirements and evaluate their impacts empirically.