OPHI researchers co-author World Bank book on measuring poverty and inequality

The World Bank has published a book co-authored by OPHI Researcher Suman Seth and Research Associate James Foster with the Bank’s Michael Lokshin and Zurab Sajaia, titled ‘A Unified Approach to Measuring Poverty and Inequality: Theory and Practice‘.

Part of the World Bank training series, the book is an introduction to the theory and practice of measuring poverty and inequality. It’s also a user’s guide for analyzing income or consumption distribution for any standard household dataset using the World Bank’s ADePT software, which was created by the poverty team of the World Bank’s Development Research Group, Development Economics.

Lokshin is Lead Economist in the Development Research Group, which also includes Sajaia. Foster is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University.

The approach taken in the book considers income standards as building blocks for basic measurement, then uses them to construct inequality and poverty measures. This unified approach provides advantages in interpreting and contrasting the measures and in understanding the way measures vary over time and space.

Of interest to teachers and students as well as to policy practitioners, ‘A Unified Approach to Measuring Poverty and Inequality’ aims to empower researchers to plumb greater depths in searching for regularity in larger and larger datasets.

You can find out more about the book here.

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OPHI Research Assistant wins Vice-Chancellor’s Civic Award

OPHI Research Assistant Elise Klein has won a Vice-Chancellor’s Civic Award for her work with the Mali Initiative, which engages with local communities to implement projects that originate from the aspirations of community members and are driven by their agency.

Klein, a PhD candidate in Development Studies at the Oxford Department for International Development (ODID), co-founded the Mali Initiative in 2004. Since then the Initiative has implemented projects including schools, agricultural projects, community health centres, start-up funds for young social entrepreneurs, and micro-credit organisations for women. Since the conflict erupted in the north of Mali, the Mali Initiative has focused on providing humanitarian support in the M’bera refugee camp and other locations, where it has set up temporary schools for refugees.

The Mali Initiative describes itself as ‘a catalyst for change’, and states: ‘Our Mission is to ignite and enable the aspirations of local Malian visionaries and, through friendship and equal partnership, help them turn their dreams for their communities into reality.’

The Oxford University Vice-Chancellor’s Civic Awards are granted every year to students who show exceptional achievement in and commitment to creating positive social change. The Awards celebrate and recognise the efforts made by students to have a positive impact in their local and global community.

Klein, whose PhD is on conceptualisations of agency in Mali, will receive the award at Enceania, the annual ceremony at which Oxford University presents its honorary degrees.

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Southern NGOs call on High Level Panel to recognise that poverty is multidimensional

A recognition of the fact that poverty is multidimensional is top of the list of concerns sent by a group of Southern NGOs to the High Level Panel advising the UN on the content of a post-2015 development agenda.

The panel is meeting in New York on 15 May to finalise its recommendations, which will be presented to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 30 May and made public on 31 May.

In an open letter, which has already been signed by well over 100 organisations, the NGOs call on the High Level Panel to ensure that their report includes six critical concerns.

’1. Poverty is multidimensional and should not be narrowly defined and measured only as a matter of income,’ the letter reads.

OPHI Director Sabina Alkire and Research Associate Andy Sumner recently published a brief proposing the consideration of a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2.0 for the post-2015 development agenda. The brief suggests that a headline MPI could provide an eye-catching and intuitive overview measure, which would complement a $1.25/day poverty line by showing how people are poor (what disadvantages they experience); in which regions or ethnic groups they are poor; and the inequalities between those living in poverty. Read the brief.

The other five concerns raised in the open letter cover human rights issues; the link between peace, security and democratic governance; the right to self-determination; a recognition of the barriers posed by climate change, deregulated global finance and an unfair global trade regime; and accountability, of governments, international financial institutions, development actors and corporations.

‘As all of these issues are based on existing international agreements and commitments, to not take them into account would be a scandal and would be detrimental to development and social justice goals,’ the letter concludes.

The group, led by Social Watch, ANND and DAWN, had gathered signatures from 122 NGOs from around the world by 14 May. You can read the letter and see the full list of signatories here.

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Bill Gates blog on measuring growth mentions MPI

Bill Gates has written a blog on measuring growth and improvements in people’s lives, in which he argues that GDP may be an inaccurate indicator in the poorest countries, and mentions other ways to measure overall living standards, including OPHI’s Multidimensional Poverty Index.

Gates, the Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, examines the challenges involved in calculating per capita GDP (Gross Domestic Product, or the value of goods and services produced by a country in a year divided by the country’s population), particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. He lists weak national statistics offices and historical biases; the difficulties of measuring the size of relatively large subsistence economies and unrecorded economic activity; infrequent reporting updates by some countries; and the fact that there are several ways to calculate GDP, which ‘can produce wildly different results’.

‘Other ways to measure overall living standards in a country are similarly imperfect; but they nonetheless provide additional ways to understand poverty,’ Gates writes in the Project Syndicate blog. ‘One, called the Human Development Index, uses health and education statistics in addition to GDP. Another, the Multidimensional Poverty Index, uses ten indicators, including nutrition, sanitation, and access to cooking fuel and water.’

Gates argues that donor governments and international organizations such as the World Bank need to do more to help African authorities produce a clearer picture of their economies, while African policymakers need to be more consistent about demanding better statistics and using them to inform decisions.

‘The better tools we have for measuring progress, the more we can ensure that those investments reach the people who need them the most,’ he concludes. You can read the blog in full here.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest transparently operated private foundation in the world and aims to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty around the world. The foundation is based in Seattle, Washington.

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Register now for NCRM training course on multidimensional poverty

The National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) has organised a two-day training course, ‘An Introduction to the Alkire Foster Method of Measuring Multidimensional Poverty’, which will be run by OPHI’s research team.

The course, which will be held in Oxford on 13-14 June 2013, aims to provide a conceptual and technical introduction to current literature and techniques of poverty measurement, with a focus on the implementation of the Alkire Foster counting method. This first course will provide an idea of the relevance of multidimensional measurement and the intuition behind a local implementation.

The programme will include a policy-focused sharing session on the international experience, a comprehensive summary of the current state of the art, the methodology, and an intuitive explanation of the implementation process. The course will also give participants the opportunity to design, tailor and calculate a multidimensional poverty measure based on the Alkire Foster methodology. Theoretical lessons will be complemented with empirical calculations (in groups).

At the end of the course, participants will know the arguments for the relevance of multidimensional poverty measures; understand why and how such measures add value to unidimensional measures and dashboards; and be able to compute Alkire Foster measures and adapt parameters to their own requirements and contexts.

The NCRM is part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) strategy to improve the standards of research methods.

For more information on the course, including how to register, click here.

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OPHI blog on measuring development post-2015 posted in Spanish

A blog by OPHI Director Sabina Alkire calling for a new ‘headline’ measure of multidimensional poverty to be considered for the post-2015 MDGs has been published in Spanish by Revista Humanum.

Alkire argues that a global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2.0 – building on the global MPI reported in the Human Development Reports for over 100 developing countries since 2010 – could provide an intuitive overview of multidimensional poverty to complement a $1.25/day measure and indicators on individual goals such as health or education.

Such a measure could enable policymakers to see at a glance whether and how multidimensional poverty was being reduced across states, for example, or different social groups; it could be quickly and easily disaggregated to show which overlapping disadvantages are faced by agricultural labourers, or by families with small children in different geographical regions.

For the post-2015 context, an MPI 2.0 could be created with dimensions, indicators and cutoffs that reflect the post-2015 development agenda, Alkire says. The process of selecting the indicators and cutoffs should be participatory, and the voices of the poor and the marginalised should drive decisions. A “child MPI” could also be created to measure multidimensional poverty among children, using the same methodology.

In addition, governments or civil society organisations can create their own national MPIs with indicators, cutoffs and values that reflect their national plan or goals, complementing and enriching a global MPI 2.0. Such measures are already in use – for example, by the Government of Colombia.

The blog is based on the OPHI briefing ‘Multidimensional Poverty and the Post-2015 MDGs‘, by Alkire and Andy Sumner, an OPHI Research Associate and Co-Director of the King’s International Development Institute at King’s College London. It first appeared in English on ODID’s Debating Development website, and can be read in full in Spanish here.

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Journal of Economic Inequality publishes paper by OPHI’s Suman Seth

OPHI Research Officer Suman Seth’s paper ‘A Class of Distribution and Association Sensitive Multidimensional Welfare Indices’ has been published in the Journal of Economic Inequality, Volume 11, Issue 2.

The paper, which was originally published as OPHI Working Paper 27, develops a two-parameter class of welfare indices that is sensitive to two distinct forms of inter-personal inequality in the multidimensional framework.

The first form of inequality pertains to the spread of each dimensional achievement across the population, as would be reflected in the multidimensional version of the usual Lorenz criterion. The second one regards association or correlation across dimensions, reflecting the key observation that inter-dimensional association may alter evaluation of individual as well as overall inequality.

Most existing multi-dimensional welfare indices are either completely insensitive to inter-personal inequality or are only sensitive to the first, but the class of indices developed in this paper is sensitive to both forms of multidimensional inequality.

An axiomatic characterization of the class is provided, and it is shown that other multidimensional indices, such as the ones developed by Bourguignon (1999) and Foster, Lopez-Calva, and Székely (2005), are sub-classes of this new broader class. Finally, essential statistical tests are constructed to verify the reliability of the evaluations generated by the indices.

You can read Seth’s paper in the JEI in full here.

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OPHI researcher takes part in Voice of Russia discussion on poverty

OPHI Research Officer José Manuel Roche was one of the guests on a Voice of Russia panel discussion on ‘Poverty: living below the line’ on 8 May.

With thousands of people across the UK taking part in the ‘Live Below the Line’ challenge, to eat for a week on just five pounds (US$7.74), the radio programme looked at how poverty is defined around the world and the difficulties involved in measuring it.

Alongside Roche on the panel were Elisha London, UK Country Director for the Global Poverty Project, which launched the ‘Live Below the Line’ initiative, and Syed Rahman Raju, an academic at Dhaka’s Daffodil University who has written extensively on food security in Bangladesh.

Roche drew attention to the difficulties of measuring poverty according to income alone, from the disparities in prices between countries, regions, and urban and rural contexts, to the need to take into account the effect of a consumer’s knowledge and education on their buying decisions, and the lack of goods to buy in areas affected by natural disasters such as drought.

Voice of Russia is the Russian government’s international radio broadcasting service, and broadcasts globally to an audience of around 109 million. You can listen to a recording of the full half-hour discussion here.

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Paper on freedoms and capabilities wins the NGO Human Welfare Prize

Oxford Department of International Development student Manini Sheker has been awarded the NGO Human Welfare prize for her paper on freedoms and capabilities.

‘“What Should I Do with That by Which I Do Not Become Immortal?”: Religion, Freedom, and Development‘ compares the views of “freedom” and the “good life” as understood by Catholic social teaching on the one hand, and the capabilities approach on the other, in order to understand how these views can be better brought into a dialogue that would enable the creation of a more holistic understanding of human welfare.

The NGO Human Welfare prize is awarded annually to a contributor to the journal Human Welfare. The winning article is selected by the Principal of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, on the grounds that it makes a significant contribution to Human Welfare’s aims; is thought provoking; demonstrates freedom of expression; and is objective.

Human Welfare: An International Journal of Graduate Research was launched in May 2012 at the 5th annual Human Welfare Conference. The journal showcases the original research of graduate students investigating issues in human welfare across the globe.

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Jean Drèze calls for regular surveys to be conducted in India

Development economist Jean Drèze has called for more regular health and nutrition surveys to be conducted in India as a first step towards implementing more effective policies.

Drèze, who is currently Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics at Allahabad University, criticises the fact that no comprehensive nutrition survey has taken place in India since 2005-6, when the third National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) was conducted. The results of NFHS-4 are not expected to be available until 2015 at the earliest — a full 10 years after the NFHS-3.

“The first step towards more effective nutrition policies in India is regular monitoring of the nutrition status of the population, and particularly that of children,” Drèze writes in an article in the Hindustan Times titled ‘No bread, lots of beer‘.

“India’s much poorer neighbours — Bangladesh and Nepal — are conducting regular health and nutrition surveys, and keeping much better track of the state of their children. In both countries, there is evidence of sustained improvement in nutrition-related indicators, such as the heights and weights of children, or the body mass index of adults. Similar evidence is yet to emerge in India.”

OPHI Director Sabina Alkire and Research Officer Suman Seth expressed their hope that new surveys would be conducted in India in the briefing ‘Multidimensional Poverty Reduction in India 1999-2006: Slower Progress for the Poorest Groups‘. They were unable to analyse how India has reduced multidimensional poverty since 2006 because of a lack of data.

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OPHI’s John Hammock appears on the front page of El País

OPHI Co-Founder and Research Associate John Hammock has appeared in the Spanish newspaper El País as part of a front-page interview with the President of Colombia, written by the Editor-in-Chief, Javier Moreno.

Hammock was present at an event at which President Juan Manuel Santos announced a reduction in multidimensional poverty, two years after his government implemented a national Multidimensional Poverty Index (the MPI-Colombia) that uses the Alkire Foster method (see ‘Colombia’s President announces fall in multidimensional poverty’).

Hammock explained to the press and many senior government officials at the event how OPHI had worked with the Colombian government to develop the index, which has dimensions and indicators devised by the government to meet its specific needs and public policy priorities in order to inform poverty reduction strategies.

You can read the full article in Spanish here.

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OPHI special issue of Social Indicators Research published in full

A special issue of Social Indicators Research (Volume 112, Issue 2, June 2013), edited by OPHI Director Sabina Alkire and OPHI Research Associate Maria Emma Santos and featuring a number of articles by OPHI researchers, has been published in full online.

The articles in ‘A Multidimensional Approach: Poverty Measurement and Beyond’ apply the Alkire Foster method of measuring multidimensional poverty to a range of different contexts. The introduction describes the AF methodology, and is available to read here.

Alkire and Suman Seth’s OPHI Working Paper 53 has been published as ‘Targeting Methods to Identify BPL Households in India.’ The paper proposes how to select a methodology to target multidimensionally poor households, and how to update that targeting exercise periodically. In 1992, 1997, and 2002 the Indian government identified households that are below the poverty line (BPL) and in updating the 2002 methodology, alternative methods have been proposed and vigorously debated. Using the third National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3), this paper illustrates how a BPL targeting method using Socio Economic Caste Census variables might be calibrated to a multidimensional poverty measure.

Diego Battiston, Guillermo Cruces, Luis Felipe Lopez Calva, Maria Ana Lugo and Maria Emma Santos’s OPHI Working Paper 17 has been published as ‘Income and Beyond: Multidimensional Poverty in Six Latin American Countries.’ This paper studies multidimensional poverty for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico and Uruguay for the period 1992–2006. The approach overcomes the limitations of the two traditional methods of poverty analysis in Latin America (income-based and unmet basic needs) by combining income with five other dimensions: school attendance for children, education of the household head, sanitation, water and shelter.

Also featured in the issue is José Manuel Roche’s OPHI Working Paper 57, ‘Monitoring Progress in Child Poverty Reduction: Methodological Insights and Illustration to the Case Study of Bangladesh.’ The paper presents a new approach to monitoring progress in child poverty reduction accompanied by an assessment of child poverty reduction in Bangladesh. The empirical evidence in the paper highlights the need to move beyond the headcount ratio towards new measures of child poverty that reflect the intensity of poverty and multiple deprivations that affect poor children at the same time.

Yélé Maweki Batana’s OPHI Working Paper 13 has been published as ‘Multidimensional Measurement of Poverty among Women in Sub-Saharan Africa.’ The paper estimates multidimensional poverty among women in 14 Sub-Saharan African countries using the Alkire Foster method. The estimates are compared with alternative measures such as the Human Development Index, income poverty, asset poverty and the Gender-related Development Index. It is found that including additional dimensions into the analysis leads to country rankings different from those obtained with these four measures.

Viviane Azevedo and Marcos Robles’ OPHI Research in Progress 20a has been published as ‘Multidimensional Targeting: Identifying Beneficiaries of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) Programs.’ This paper proposes a multidimensional targeting approach to identifying beneficiaries, which explicitly takes into consideration the multiple objectives of CCTs and the multiple deprivations of poor households. Results indicate that the proposed multidimensional targeting methodology significantly improves the selection of households with children who are most deprived in the dimensions often relevant to CCTs. In the case of Mexico’s Oportunidades, ex-ante evaluation results indicate that the multidimensional identification of beneficiaries increases the impact of transfers on school attendance, compared to alternative targeting models.

The complete OPHI special issue of SIR is available to view here.

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Alkire speaks on Sustainable Development Goals and MPI

OPHI Director Sabina Alkire spoke at a meeting of the UN General Assembly’s Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals on 18 April, taking part in a session on poverty eradication.

Almost every country was represented at the session, where the keynote address was given by Professor Abhijit Banerjee, International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Olaf Kjørven, Assistant Secretary-General of UNDP, introduced an issues note prepared by the UN System Technical Support Team.

Alkire spoke about the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Assistant Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), also presented. An animated discussion filled the remainder of the three-hour session.

Alkire went on to take part in a conference on ‘Growth, Poverty, and Inequality: Confronting the Challenges of a Better Life for All in Africa‘, held at Cornell University on 19-20 April in honour of Erik Thorbecke.

The conference was organised by the Institute for African Development at Cornell University and the African Economic Research Consortium. Alkire presented jointly with OPHI Research Associate Professor James Foster on changes in multidimensional poverty over time in 12 African countries (see ‘How Multidimensional Poverty went Down‘).

On 22 April, Alkire spoke at the Centre for International Development (CID) at Harvard University, as part of CID’s Special Speaker Series. Alkire, who is a Research Associate at Harvard, gave a presentation on ‘Reducing Multidimensional Poverty: An Analysis of MPI Trends Over Time’.

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Colombia’s President announces fall in multidimensional poverty

Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos has announced a fall in multidimensional poverty, two years after his government implemented a national Multidimensional Poverty Index (the MPI-Colombia) that uses the Alkire Foster method.

OPHI began working with the Colombian government’s Ministry of Planning in 2010 to construct the new measure, which underlies firm and binding targets to close the country’s multidimensional poverty gaps. The dimensions and indicators were devised by Colombia to meet its specific needs and public policy priorities in order to inform poverty reduction strategies.

Based on national statistics, the MPI-Colombia showed a drop in multidimensional poverty, from 29.4% in 2011 to 27% in 2012. President Santos said his government had also reduced the income poverty rate from 34.1% to 32.7% in two years, lifting some 1.7 million people out of poverty.

OPHI Co-Founder and Research Associate John Hammock took part in the meeting of the Inter-Ministerial Poverty Coordinating Committee where the results were announced. The news was widely covered in the media, both in Colombia (see El Tiempo, El Espectador, La República, Portafolio,  El Universal, Semana) and further afield; for example in China (see Xinhua and China Daily).

Hammock earlier gave a presentation on multidimensional poverty measures at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in Managua, Nicaragua, which will host a Spanish-language intensive training course to be run by OPHI from 30 August – 7 September 2013.

Colombia is one of a number of countries to have implemented a multidimensional measure that builds on OPHI’s research (for others see here). Building on the flexibility inherent in the AF method, the MPI-Colombia assesses the broader social and health-related aspects of poverty in five dimensions:

• Household education conditions;
• Childhood and youth conditions;
• Labour;
• Health;
• Access to household utilities and living conditions.

The five dimensions are equally weighted and use 15 indicators. Find out more.

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Alkire takes part in OECD’s Global Forum for Development

OPHI director Sabina Alkire spoke recently at the OECD’s Global Forum for Development in Paris, which had the theme ‘Innovative Approaches to Poverty Reduction, Social Cohesion and Progress in the post-2015 World’.

Alkire was a panellist discussing ‘The global-national nexus’ alongside the World Bank’s Otaviano Canuto, Vice President and Head of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) Network, and Abdalla Hamdok, Deputy Executive Secretary, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), among others.

The panel highlighted the trends that are challenges or opportunities to defining national policy frameworks, and what role global uncertainties play. They were tasked with describing their perspective of poverty, how it is evolving and how it persists.

Among the questions they discussed were:

• What do the new trends in poverty imply for policy in countries that have not yet achieved the original MDGs?
• How can national poverty policies respond to global challenges and opportunities?
• What analytical frameworks have proven helpful to countries and others supporting country-led efforts to understand and design poverty reduction policies that respond to the country’s specific context?

For more information and all the background papers to the conference, see the 2013 Global Forum for Development website.

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OPHI seeking Project Assistant

OPHI is looking for a motivated and competent Project Assistant who relishes a challenge and will enjoy working in a fast-paced research centre in a period of growth. In turn, OPHI can offer a supportive, collegial, and international work environment as a part of the Oxford Department of International Development and the University of Oxford. The postholder will work with the OPHI team and will be involved with office and project administration, course and workshop coordination and communications assistance.

The Project Assistant should have relevant administration experience including: excellent organisation skills and the ability to work independently; proven IT skills including a good working knowledge of Microsoft Office, reference software, and use and development of online resources; excellent English writing skills including the ability to draft communication and undertake reasonable copy editing; and the ability to communicate effectively with staff and colleagues in the UK and overseas. The postholder will report to the Director and to the Project Coordinator.

The post is full-time for 1 year in the first instance.

Applications for this vacancy are to be made online. You will be required to upload a supporting statement as part of your online application.

Only applications received before 12.00 noon on Wednesday 8 May 2013 can be considered.

To apply, and to access the further particulars for this post, please go to the link below:

University of Oxford Recruitment Site (ref: 107522)

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OPHI’s Ballon provides technical support in development of HANCI

OPHI Research Officer Paola Ballon Fernandez has provided technical support to the creators of a new index that ranks governments on their political commitment to tackling hunger and undernutrition.

The Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI), developed by the Institute of Development Studies, was created to provide greater transparency and public accountability by measuring what governments achieve, and where they fail, in addressing hunger and undernutrition. It aims to praise governments where due, and highlight areas for improvement; support civil society to reinforce and stimulate additional commitment towards accelerating the reduction of hunger and undernutrition; and assess whether improving commitment levels lead to a reduction in hunger and undernutrition.

The HANCI compares 45 developing countries for their performance on 22 indicators of political commitment to reduce hunger and undernutrition, looking at three areas of government action: policies and programmes, legal frameworks and public expenditures. The index measures commitment to reduce hunger and commitment to reduce undernutrition separately, because hunger and undernutrition are not the same thing. Guatemala came top for both hunger and nutrition commitment in 2012, while the worst-performing country was Guinea Bissau.

‘Where high levels of political commitment exist, we could see dramatic decreases in the levels of illness and death caused by chronic hunger and to the irreversible damage to the physical and mental development of children caused by undernutrition,’ said lead HANCI researcher at IDS, Dr Dolf te Lintelo, in a statement.

The HANCI draws on secondary data (owned by governments) and complements this with primary data on expert and community perspectives on political commitment in Bangladesh, Malawi and Zambia. It situates levels of political commitment within specific country contexts, such as their levels of wealth and economic growth, government effectiveness and, not least, their hunger and undernutrition statuses.

OPHI’s Ballon helped the HANCI team at IDS to calculate and interpret the Cronbach alphas – coefficients of internal consistency – and is acknowledged for her support in the report.

You can read the HANCI 2012 report in full here.

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March e-Update – Catch up on all the latest news from OPHI

The March issue of the e-Update is now available and is packed with news and publications, including:

• Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2013 findings released
• OPHI announces Amartya Sen lecture and policy network launch 6 June 2013
• OPHI special issue of Social Indicators Research is published online
• Alkire and Sumner call for an MPI 2.0 for the post-2015 development agenda
• The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index celebrates its first anniversary
• James Foster makes acclaimed call for a post-2015 MPI at CSAE Conference
• Global MPI briefings and five new Working Papers published
• OPHI-HDCA intensive Spanish-language training course in Nicaragua
• OPHI invites applications for Senior Research Officer position

For all this and much more, please see the March issue.

If you’d like to receive the e-Update as an email, please join our mailing list. Previous issues of the e-Update are available to download here.

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OPHI input to UNICEF multidimensional child poverty measurement training

UNICEF’s Cairo office recently hosted a training course on ‘Child Poverty and Disparity Measurement and Analysis’, run jointly by UNICEF with OPHI, Laval University’s Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP) network and the International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) Middle East and North Africa (MENA) office.

The course, which ran from 9-14 March, provided technical experts from governments across the region with an in-depth overview of the conceptual and methodological aspects of measuring child poverty, using both monetary and multidimensional approaches. Led by Professor Jean-Yves Duclos from Laval University and OPHI Research Officers Paola Ballon and José Manuel Roche, among others, the course combined formal presentations with practical sessions, in which participants used real data to calculate and analyse the measures discussed.

It also gave UNICEF an oppportunity to present its ongoing project MODA (Multiple Overlapping Deprivation Analysis), which builds on the Alkire Foster method, OPHI’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), and UNICEF’s Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities, as well as other research carried out in this field.

The course aimed to expose government officials from key agencies in MENA countries to the full range of methodologies, and create a better understanding of the policy implications of a multidimensional approach to measuring child poverty and inequality.

OPHI has published several papers on taking a multidimensional approach to measuring child poverty, including Roche’s Monitoring Progress in Child Poverty Reduction: Methodological Insights and Illustration to the Case Study of Bangladesh, which has been published in Social Indicators Research, and Beyond Headcount: Measures that Reflect the Breadth and Components of Child Poverty, by Roche and OPHI’s Director, Sabina Alkire.

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Hammock promotes OPHI’s multidimensional approach in Latin America

OPHI Research Associate John Hammock presented the Alkire Foster counting approach to multidimensional poverty measurement in the Dominican Republic and Brazil this month.

Accompanied by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Hammock met with the Vice-President of the Dominican Republic, Margarita Cedeño de Fernández, as well as high-level policymakers from the National Office of Statistics; the Ministry of Economics, Planning and Development; and Progressing with Solidarity, a government anti-poverty programme. He also presented the Alkire Foster method, which underlies OPHI’s global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and several national measures, to the National Network of Microfinance Institutions and UN staff.

Hammock said there was strong interest in the Dominican Republic both in a national multidimensional poverty measure, and in using the method for the targeting of government anti-poverty programmes.

Following this visit, Hammock participated in a day-long workshop on multidimensional poverty in Brasilia, which was sponsored by UNDP, at which he presented the MPI methodology and its application by a number of countries. The workshop, which was attended by representatives of nine State Governments of Brazil and a number of Federal Government agencies, also heard talks on the application of the Alkire Foster approach in Minas Gerais and Sao Paolo, and by an NGO in Rio de Janeiro.

While in Brasilia, Hammock met with Secretary Paulo Jannuzzi and technical staff from the Office for Evaluation and Information Management at the Ministry of Social Development.

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