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.