OPHI Summer School 2018

Organised by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford, was held at Oxford Department of International Development, in Oxford, England, 16-27 July 2018.

The purpose of this intensive Summer School was to provide a thorough technical and practical introduction to multidimensional poverty measurement with a strong emphasis on the Alkire-Foster method. After completing the course, students obtained the skills required to construct and analyse an official national multidimensional poverty measure and to describe its policy relevance. Drawing on Amartya Sen’s capability approach and empirical examples of National and Global Multidimensional Poverty Indices (MPIs), the conceptual and empirical motivation for measuring multidimensional poverty were  presented, as well as the full suite of measurement tools including estimation, dimensional breakdown, disaggregation by population subgroup, standard errors and statistical inference, robustness, communications, policy applications, and so on.

The following topics were covered:

• Unidimensional poverty measures;
• Methodologies to analyse multidimensional poverty and the problems each methodology best solves;
• The Alkire-Foster methodology of multidimensional poverty measurement;
• Measurement design – purpose, unit of measure, dimensions, indicators, cut-offs and weights;
• Estimation of multidimensional poverty and interpretation of the results;
• Subgroup decomposition, dimensional break-down and mapping;
• Multidimensional poverty changes over time;
• Interpretation and analysis of multidimensional poverty, including impact evaluation;
• Institutions, policies and communication.

The summer school was led by OPHI Director Sabina Alkire and the OPHI team, including Fedora Carbajal, Mihika Chatterjee, Adriana Conconi, James Foster, Usha Kanagaratnam, Rebeca Kritsch, Bilal Malaeb, Corinne Mitchell, Juliana Milovich, Ricardo Nogales, Christian Oldiges, Monica Pinilla, Nicolai Suppa and Ana Vaz.