While evaluating the Millennium Development Goals, the facts that will emerge is that not all
countries will meet all the goals, and there are significant complimentaries among failing on specific
goals. This paper proposes one such index that will measure the extent of access to multiple
services available to individuals, and we call it the Multidimensional Human Opportunity Index
(MHOI). This index builds on the Human Opportunity Index (HOI) of the World Bank that measures
children’s access to basic service, such as access to clean water. Instead of providing a
dashboard of dimensions and equality to access for each of these services, the MHOI adds to this
framework the concept of joint access to multiple services or access to a bundle of services. We
apply the MHOI to Nepal and Bhutan data and show that although each basic service is available
to a large proportion of the population, about two-thirds in Bhutan, and only half in Nepal have
access to all the basic services in 2011/2012. The MHOI is higher in Bhutan than Nepal, but Nepal
is making big strides in closing the MHOI gap between the two countries.