OPHI Summer School

The Faculty of Governance, Economics, and Social Sciences will host the OPHI Summer School from July 1st to July 12th. This two-week program focuses on using multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis to guide effective poverty reduction.


ABOUT OPHI :
The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) is an economic research and policy center within the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. Established in 2007, the center aims to build and advance a more systematic methodological and economic framework for reducing multidimensional poverty.

OVERVIEW :
The Summer School is aimed at those who are working on, or actively interested in gaining skills in, multidimensional poverty measurement, particularly professional staff of national offices of statistics and government ministries that deal with poverty reduction, professionals from international development institutions, academics, and doctoral students. The Summer School will be led by OPHI Director, Sabina Alkire, and the OPHI team, including researchers and academics with extensive experience of developing and implementing Multidimensional Poverty Indices (MPIs).

The purpose of this intensive Summer School is to provide a technical introduction to multidimensional poverty measurement using the Alkire-Foster (AF) method, and to share examples of its practical applications. Upon completing the course, students will have the skills required to construct and analyse a multidimensional poverty measure and will be able to describe its policy relevance and usefulness for analytical purposes. Drawing on Amartya Sen’s capability approach and empirical examples of national and global MPIs, the conceptual and empirical motivation for measuring multidimensional poverty will be presented, as well as the full suite of measurement tools.

The OPHI Summer School 2024 agenda includes two special panels that are open to the public:

LEARNING OBJECTIVES :
By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

  • Understand the conceptual and empirical motivation for measuring multidimensional poverty
  • Understand the Alkire-Foster (AF) method and apply it to compute a multidimensional index
  • Interpret and effectively communicate results, including subgroup decomposition and
  • dimensional breakdown
  • Understand how the multidimensional measure can be used as a policy tool
  • Understand the advantages and limits of different data sources for measuring multidimensional
  • poverty using the Alkire-Foster method
  • Understand the key properties and uses of national and cross-national multidimensional
  • measures (e.g. global MPI)