OPHI Previous Events

Many OPHI events are available to watch or listen to online. See the Podcasts page for videos and audio recordings of OPHI events.

28 July 2010
International Seminar on New Techniques for Measuring Poverty, Wellbeing and Inequality of Opportunity
Bogota, Colombia
The Colombian Ministry of Planning, Departamento Nacional de Planeación (DNP), in collaboration with the World Bank, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and OPHI will hold an international seminar on new techniques for measuring poverty, wellbeing and inequality of opportunity on 28-29 July in Bogota, Colombia. The seminar will be opened by Esteban Piedrahita, the Director General of DNP, Sabina Alkire, OPHI Director, David Rosemberg, Lead Economist at the World Bank and Juan Carlos Ramírez, Director ECLAC Colombia. For more information on the International Seminar and links to relevant materials, please see the Departamento Nacional de Planeación's website.

08 July 2010
Multidimensional Measurement and Analysis of Poverty and Progress in the Next Decade
St. Catherine’s College, Oxford
4th ESRC Research Methods Festival
OPHI’s Sabina Alkire is presenting on poverty and progress in the next decade in a panel at the 4th ESRC Research Methods Festival, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford on Thursday 8 July at 11am.

02 July 2010
How Can Academics Have More Impact on Global Poverty?
University of the West of England, Bristol (UK)
Academics Stand Against Poverty are hosting this event on 2 July 2010, from 1.30-3pm, at the Third Biennial International Global Ethics Conference, University of the West of England, Bristol (UK). The panel includes Sabina Alkire (Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative), Thomas Pogge (Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University), and Paula Casal (Research Professor at ICREA (the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies)).

Many academics believe that the better-off citizens and states of the world are morally required to do much more than they are currently doing to end global poverty. Is there anything that we can do that would be likely to help stimulate such action, anything that we are not currently doing? Is there anything we can do as academics, in particular, using our distinctive roles and skills? If there are a range of different activities that we could do to further this end, which of those activities are likely to be most successful? For further information on this event see the conference website.

14 June 2010
OPHI Special Lecture by Professor François Bourguignon
Seminar Room 3, Queen Elizabeth House, 3 Mansfield Road
Multidimensional Inequality Measurement and the Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index François Bourguignon is Director of the Paris School of Economics and Director of d'études à l'Ecole des hautes études en sciences socials. He served as Chief Economist of the World Bank from 2003-2007 and holds doctorates from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and University of Orleans, France.

12 June 2010
OPHI Workshop on Multidimensional Poverty and Inequality: New Methods and Research Directions
Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford

07 June 2010
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: Measuring Group Disadvantage with Probabilities
Seminar Room 3, Queen Elizabeth House
Gaston Yalonetzky (OPHI)

04 June 2010
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: The Capability Approach and Comparisons of Well-being Among Pensioners in UK
Seminar Room 3
Lucas Pedace (HM Treasury)

24 May 2010
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: Understanding Entrepreneurship: The Case of Chile
Seminar Room 3
Mauricio Apablaza (University of Nottingham and OPHI Visiting Student)

17 May 2010
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: A Multidimensional Analysis of Workers' Capabilities in the context of the Chilean Labour Market
Seminar Room 3
Kirsten Sehnbruch (Universidad de Chile)

13 May 2010
International Conference on Measuring Multidimensional Poverty in Latin America
Raúl Prebisch Conference Hall, Santiago, Chile
OPHI is teaming up with the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the Chilean Government’s Ministry of Planning (MIDEPLAN) and the Foundation for Overcoming Poverty (FSP) to organise an international conference ‘Measuring Multidimensional Poverty in Latin America’, to be closed by the President of Chile.More...

10 May 2010
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: Relative or Absolute: The Dynamics of the Gini
Seminar Room 3
Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay (University of Birmingham and London School of Economics)

26 April 2010
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: The Sarkozy Commission Recommendations and the Future for Measurement of Non Market Output
Meeting Room A
Matthew Powell (Senior Consultant, Oxford Policy Management) and Mark Chandler (UK Centre for the Measurement of Government Activity, Office of National Statistics)

12 March 2010
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: Measuring Multidimensional Poverty for the 2010 HDR: Preliminary Results
Meeting Room A, Queen Elizabeth House
Sabina Alkire (OPHI)

01 March 2010
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: Understanding the Structure of Group Inequalities: Examining the Capability Approach from a Sociological Perspective
Meeting Room A, Queen Elizabeth House
José Manuel Roche (OPHI)

22 February 2010
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: A New Class of Inter-Temporal Poverty Measures
Meeting Room A, Queen Elizabeth House
Laurence Roope (School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester)

15 February 2010
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: On Chronic Poverty, Time and Human Rights
Meeting Room A, Queen Elizabeth House
Yishai Mishor (Oxford Faculty of Law)

08 February 2010
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: The Road Not Taken: Why Some Indicators Were Excluded from OPHI's Multidimensional Poverty Index
Meeting Room A, Queen Elizabeth House
Karin Eli (OPHI)

28 January 2010
Lecture at IDS, Sussex: Rephrasing Human Development for the 2010 HDR
IDS, Sussex
Listen to Sabina Alkire's lecture at the Institute of Development Studies, Brighton on 28 January. Sabina discussed how a new concept of human development is being formulated for the 2010 Human Development Report (HDR). Since 1990, many have described human development as 'enlarging people's choices'. But that leaves out people's voice and agency; it ignores the environment and it is blind to inequality (whose choices matter most?). The twentieth anniversary edition of the HDR will propose a new concept of human development, which includes capabilities, processes, and agency as integral parts of development, and observes that we share the same planet. To read about how you can contribute, click here. A podcast of the lecture is available on the IDS website.

23 November 2009
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: The Effect of Income Inequality on Consumer Prices
Seminar Room 2, Queen Elizabeth House
Babak Somekh (Oxford Department of Economics)

19 November 2009
Oxford Events with Amartya Sen
University of Oxford, UK
OPHI organised several events with Amartya Sen, Harvard University Professor and Advisor to OPHI, in Oxford on 19-20 November. Sen spoke at a Roundtable on Economics with politicians, academics and policy makers, and delivered a lecture on The Pursuit of Justice which was chaired by the Chancellor of the University on 19 November. These events were followed by a Philosophy Seminar with Sen and several distinguished speakers on 20 November.

16 November 2009
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: On Time, Chronic Poverty and Human Rights
Seminar Room 2, Queen Elizabeth House
Yishai Mishor (Oxford Faculty of Law)

09 November 2009
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: An International Multidimensional Poverty Index: Progress to Date on the 2010 HDR
Seminar Room 2, Queen Elizabeth House
Sabina Alkire (OPHI)

26 October 2009
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: Inequality of Opportunity in India
Seminar Room 2, Queen Elizabeth House
Gaston Yalonetzky (OPHI)

19 October 2009
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: Inequality in Multiple Dimensions of Wellbeing
Seminar Room 2, Queen Elizabeth House
Emma Samman (OPHI/IDS)

28 August 2009
Special Seminar

Francisco Ferreira (World Bank), 'Inequality of economic opportunity in Latin America'.

27 August 2009
HDCA Summer School on Capability and Multidimensional Poverty
Catholic University, Lima, Peru
The purpose of this intensive summer school was to provide a thorough conceptual and technical introduction to current quantitative literature and techniques of measuring and comparing capabilities, drawing on various techniques of multidimensional measurement and of statistical analysis.

16 August 2009
OPHI Workshop on Missing Dimensions of Poverty Data
Durban
OPHI held a workshop on ‘Missing Dimensions of Poverty Data’ immediately preceding the 57th Session of the International Statistical Institute in Durban, South Africa on 16 August, 2009. The workshop presented OPHI’s survey modules on violence, empowerment, decent work, dignity, and subjective well-being, its findings on the added value of these data, and how the Missing Dimensions agenda might inform poverty reduction efforts. More...

17 June 2009
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: Income and Beyond: Multidimensional Poverty in Six Latin American Countries
Meeting Room A, Garden Floor, QEH
Maria Emma Santos (OPHI)

10 June 2009
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: A Class of Multidimensional Poverty Measures Sensitive to the Breadth of Deprivations
Meeting Room A, Garden Floor, QEH
Sabina Alkire (OPHI) and James Foster (OPHI/Vanderbilt)

03 June 2009
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: Assessing Rank Robustness of Multidimensional Welfare Indicators with Intergroup Concordance Tests
Meeting Room A, Garden Floor, QEH
Gaston Yalonetzky (OPHI)

01 June 2009
OPHI Workshop on Multidimensional Measures in Six Contexts
Queen Elizabeth House, Department of International Development, University of Oxford
OPHI’s June 2009 small, high-level research workshop examined several multidimensional measures used in six specific contexts - including the multidimensional poverty methodology developed by OPHI - to critically compare them, identify commonalities, advantages and disadvantages of different methodologies, and isolated shared weaknesses for which new methodologies should be developed. The six contexts were: quality of education, child and youth poverty, governance and political freedom, fair trade, gender, and targeting of social programmes. More...

28 May 2009
‘Distribution and Development’ – course with James Foster, May–June 2009
Queen Elizabeth House, Department of International Development, University of Oxford
James Foster, a Research Associate who will be at OPHI in Trinity Term 2009, presented a course comprising eight classes on ‘Distribution and Development’. The course was aimed at PPE or postgraduate economics students with an interest in poverty, inequality, and economic development.

27 May 2009
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: Measuring Health Inequality
Meeting Room A, Garden Floor, QEH
James Foster (OPHI and Vanderbilt)

20 May 2009
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: Dominance Curves and Multidimensional Poverty Analysis with Ordinal Data
Meeting Room B, Library Wing, QEH
Casilda Lasso de la Vega (University of the Basque Country)

19 May 2009
Book launch 'Moving Out of Poverty: Success from the Bottom Up', by Deepa Narayan
Seminar Room 1, Department of International Development (QEH)
Poverty studies typically focus on people who live below the poverty line. Few studies have examined how people not only move out of poverty but also stay out of poverty. A follow-up to the Voices of the Poor, the second volume of the Moving Out of Poverty project, Success from the Bottom Up represents one of the few large-scale comparative research attempts to address these questions. The book is coauthored by Deepa Narayan, Lant Pritchett and Soumya Kapoor and it is based on life stories, interviews, and questionnaires with more than 60,000 people in Africa, East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America. “This book...is an important resource for everyone who's working to alleviate poverty”.–Former President Bill Clinton. Speaker: Deepa Narayan Chair: Sabina Alkire Announcement [pdf]

13 May 2009
OPHI Lunchtime Seminar: A Class of Association Sensitive Multidimensional Welfare Indices
Meeting Room A, Queen Elizabeth House
Suman Seth (Vanderbilt)

07 May 2009
Gordon Anderson presents Distinguished Visitor Lecture on Development
Seminar Room 2, Dept of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford
Professor Anderson presented the ‘Poor Country-Rich Country Convergence or Polarization in Lifetime Wellbeing: Africa and the Rest’. Gordon Anderson is a Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics University of Toronto. He holds a PhD from London School of Economics; awarded both the Bowley Prize for work in applied statistics by the LSE, and the Sayers Prize for work in money and macroeconomics by the University of London. Initially trained as an applied time series econometrician his interest in recent years has turned to issues in empirical welfare analysis in the form of making inferences about well-being, poverty, inequality, mobility, and polarization.

05 May 2009
OPHI Workshop on Robustness Methods for Multidimensional Welfare Analysis
Queen Elizabeth House, Department of International Development, University of Oxford
The goal of this OPHI workshop was to identify and discuss specific areas for research aimed at developing stronger methodologies of robustness for multidimensional well-being analysis. Special emphasis was given to stochastic dominance techniques. The sessions surveyed how various methods have been applied in the literature, and identify strengths and weaknesses of the techniques and discuss potential further developments. More...

25 March 2009
OPHI Contributes to the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship

04 March 2009
OPHI Training for PEP survey teams from Nigeria, Chad and Sri Lanka
Poverty and Economic Policy (PEP) Network Annual Meeting, Manila
Between 4 and 25 March 2009, OPHI staff in Oxford conducted a training course on survey design, implementation and analysis for representatives of three successful teams that were awarded grants by OPHI and the Poverty and Economic Policy (PEP) network at the PEP annual meeting in Manila, December 2008. The three teams used these grants to implement OPHI's survey modules in parts of Chad, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, respectively, both to generate data on the Missing Dimensions and also to investigate the validity of the survey instruments in their particular countries. The course aimed to familiarize the participants with academic research on survey design. It also provided support to the participants' design of an integrated questionnaire, guidelines for implementation, Access database, as well as the identification of key research questions and strategies for data tabulation and analysis - all of which they can draw upon when implementing the survey in their own countries.

01 January 2009
Course on human development for masters' students at QEH: Hilary 2009

14 October 2008
OPHI Workshop on Policy: Uruguay Round
Montevideo, Uruguay.
OPHI held its first workshop with high-level policymakers from Latin America on 14/ 15 October in Montevideo, Uruguay. The aim was to assess the policy implications of OPHI's work on the “missing dimensions” of human development. More...

11 September 2008
2008 Conference of the HDCA: "Equality, Inclusion and Human Development"
New Delhi, India
OPHI researchers organised a panel on multidimensional poverty in the 2008 HDCA Annual Conference held on 11-13 September in New Delhi, India. The event, hosted by the Institute of Human Development, featured keynote speakers such as Jean Dreze, Frances Stewart, Martha Nussbaum, James Foster, and Niraja Gopal Jayal. learn more...

28 August 2008
Summer School on Capability and Multidimensional Poverty
New Delhi, India
OPHI and HDCP-IRC co-organised the HDCA Summer School in New Delhi, India 28 August - 9 September 2008. The intensive summer school provided a thorough conceptual and technical introduction to current literature and techniques of measuring and comparing capabilities. The course materials include powerpoints, problem sets (both conceptual and in stata), problem solutions, and videos of lectures.

17 June 2008
Seminar "Inequality of economic opportunity in Latin America"
Seminar Room C, Manor Road Building,University of Oxford
Francisco Ferreira (World Bank) "Inequality of economic opportunity in Latin America"

16 June 2008
OPHI OPEN DIALOGUE DAY
Seminar Room 2, Dept of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford
Most countries of the world define poverty by income. Yet poor people themselves define their poverty much more broadly—to include lack of education, health, empowerment, employment, personal security and more. Do these differences matter? OPHI researchers presented results of work in progress on Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, India, and Bhutan. In each of these cases, OPHI researchers use existing data to compare income poverty with a new multidimensional poverty measure (Alkire & Foster Working Paper 7) and explore the value added. More...

12 June 2008
Seminar "Multidimensional Poverty Measurement Methods. The Latin American tradition and the Mexican Experience"
Seminar Room 1, Department of International Development (QEH)
Julio Boltvinik and Araceli Damian (Colegio de Mexico)

28 May 2008
OPHI Workshop on Measuring Freedoms
Queen Elizabeth House, Department of International Development, University of Oxford
A great deal of attention has focused on empirical studies related to multidimensional poverty. The overall goal of OPHI’s May workshop was to identify the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of alternative approaches to measuring freedoms, to clarify which techniques are most suited for empirical studies, and to chart concrete directions for future research. More...

26 May 2008
OPHI Workshop on Weighting in Multidimensional Poverty Measures
Oxford, UK (Queen Elizabeth House, Department of International Development, University of Oxford)
In constructing multidimensional poverty measures, it is possible to apply weights a) in aggregating variables within one dimension; b) in aggregating across dimensions; c) in aggregating across people. At each point of aggregation, we need to determine the parameters that define the marginal contribution of each indicator, dimension, or individual to the overall well-being (or deprivation), taking into consideration also the possible interconnections among them. OPHI’s May 2008 workshop considered a number of techniques to set weights for multidimensional measures. More...

15 May 2008
Seminar. James Foster "Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measures"
Queen Elizabeth House, Seminar Room 1.
Prof Foster presented his paper with Sabina Alkire (2008): "Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measures," OPHI Working Paper 7

03 November 2007
OPHI team to launch Missing Dimensions research theme
Beijing
The Center for Human and Economic Development (CHEDS) of Peking University hosted an international workshop on “Dimensions and Indicators of Human Development” on 3-4 November 2007. OPHI team members presented revised versions of papers on missing dimensions of poverty data, originally delivered at OPHI’s Launch in May, and solicited the input of Chinese researchers and policymakers.

View programme
View participant list

17 September 2007
2007 Conference of the HDCA: "Ideas Changing History"
New York
OPHI staff participated in the 2007 HDCA Annual Conference "Ideas Changing History" held on the 17th-20th of September in New York. The event, hosted by the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School in New York City and supported by Frederick S. Pardee and the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, featured keynote speakers such as Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Hilary Putnam, Anthony Appiah and Sir Richard Jolly. Over 320 persons attended, and 170 papers were presented. learn more...

30 May 2007
OPHI Launch Events 2007
University of Oxford
OPHI was launched in a series of events, including three public seminars on 30-31 May 2007, and by a Lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre by Amartya Sen on 30 May at 5pm. Watch these presentations and discussions on OPHI's podcasts page.

28 March 2007
OPHI Workshop on Teaching Human Development, Oxford
Oxford, UK (Queen Elizabeth House, Department of International Development, University of Oxford)
OPHI convened a four-day workshop in March 2007 on educational material for human development, to discuss course design and curriculum, pedagogical approaches to teaching human development, virtual learning spaces, textbooks and other teaching materials. More...