The 2019 Cohort Completes their Training at the OPHI Summer School in Mexico City

The 2019 cohort of the OPHI Summer School has just completed an intensive two-week training in multidimensional poverty measurement. 

The OPHI Summer School is an annual course led by OPHI Director Sabina Alkire and the OPHI team that provides a thorough technical and practical introduction to multidimensional poverty measurement with a strong emphasis on the Alkire-Foster method. 

Held in different countries each year, the 2019 Summer School was hosted by CONEVAL at their headquarters in Mexico City. As the first country to develop an official national measure of multidimensional poverty based on the Alkire-Foster method, CONEVAL was a motivating setting for nearly 60 participants representing 23 countries from around the world to come together to develop their skills and gain inspiration. Attendees represented a cross section of the development sector, ranging from professional staff from national offices of statistics and government ministries to researchers and students from academia and international agencies. 

During the course, special speakers included: Executive Secretary of CONEVAL, Dr José Nabor Cruz Marcelo; Professor James Foster, the Oliver T Carr Jr Professor of International Affairs at the George Washington University; and Luis Felipe López-Calva, UN Development Programme (UNDP) Assistant Administrator and Regional Director for Latin American and the Caribbean. 

Taking participants through Amartya Sen’s capability approach and empirical examples of national and global multidimensional poverty indices were the OPHI team, which included OPHI Director Sabina Alkire, Adriana Conconi, Usha Kanagaratnam, Corinne Mitchell, Ricardo Nogales, Christian Oldiges, Monica Pinilla-Roncancio, and Frank Vollmer. The OPHI team also covered the conceptual and empirical motivation for measuring multidimensional poverty, as well as estimation, dimensional breakdown, disaggregation by population subgroup, standard errors and statistical inference, robustness, communications and policy applications. Supporting the course were Freya Paulucci-Couldrick, Émeline Marcelin and Johanna Andrango. 

Following presentations and an exam, participants demonstrated that they had developed the skills required to construct and analyse a multidimensional poverty measure using the Alkire-Foster method, and to describe its policy relevance. 

For those interested in applying next year, details will be advertised in the spring. 

Pictures of the sessions are available here and here. 

Video summary of the opening session here. 

Full video here. 

Introduction to the Alkire-Foster method by Professor James Foster and Dr Christian Oldiges here.

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