Multidimenisonal Poverty around the world: Unmasking Disparities

This session of the webinar series will feature Dr. Sabina Alkire. She is the Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. The full title of her lecture is Multidimenisonal Poverty around the world: Unmasking Disparities by Ethnicity, Place Gender.

Abstract

‘Multidimensional poverty indices such as the global MPI measure deprivations people experience directly, and so they can be disaggregated by any variables for which datasets are representative. They also draw on microdata, including data on individual household members. This seminar will present the intuitive findings of the October 2021 global MPI report, and also point out, for those interested, how the disparities it reveals across ethnic groups and the gendered and intrahousehold analyses make use of these facets of the datasets.

Biography

Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. Previously, she worked at the George Washington University, Harvard University, the Human Security Commission, and the World Bank. She has a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford.

Together with Professor James Foster, Sabina developed the Alkire-Foster (AF) method for measuring multidimensional poverty, a flexible technique that can incorporate different dimensions, or aspects of poverty, to create measures tailored to each context. With colleagues at OPHI this has been applied and implemented empirically to produce a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). The MPI offers a tool to identify who is poor by considering the range of deprivations they suffer. It is used to report a headline figure of poverty (the MPI), which can be unpacked to provide a detailed information platform for policy design showing how people are poor nationally, and how they are poor by areas, groups, and by each indicator.

Format

Dr. Alkire will be speaking for the first 45 minutes. We will then be holding a Q&A Session.

This session is part of the larger project:

Dissecting Capitalism: Its past, present and future

This series aims to explore the tenets of capitalism over the fabric of time and examine its influence on the global economy and social classes.