OPHI wins 2025 Social Sciences Impact Award for 'Scaling and Sustaining Impact'
Sabina Alkire and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) have won a 2025 Social Sciences Impact Award in the category ‘Scaling and Sustaining Impact’. OPHI was awarded the prize for its work 'Addressing multidimensional poverty in developing nations through measurement and policy applications’.
Since 2021, OPHI has partnered with 15 countries to release new national Multidimensional Poverty Indices as official poverty statistics for the first time: data that enables nations to develop the targeted public policies to address the causes of poverty. Through extensive collaboration with policy actors and meaningful capacity building, OPHI’s work has now informed public policy activities in over 40 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, opening up opportunities for better outcomes for over 3 billion people – delivering impact on a truly international scale.
The 2025 Social Sciences Impact Awards celebrate social science colleagues of all career stages across the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University who are making significant contributions to society or the economy through meaningful collaboration with non-academic partners.
A video exploring OPHI’s impact was premiered at the event. The award for Scaling and Sustaining Impact was presented by Professor Chas Bountra, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Oxford who remarked on the need for social scientists to inspire each other and act now to address a range of current global crises. On receiving the award for OPHI, Sabina highlighted how poverty reduction relies on ‘a web of people, with different skills, but a common cause, finding each other and working together for a time.’
Touching on current developments in international development, Sabina also commented on how ‘Traditional development assistance is being cut or reshaped in unpredictable ways. Yet new actors are likely to take up the fight against poverty – new institutions, volunteers, businesses, philanthropists, youth. We hope that data and our measures of multidimensional poverty will continue to make visible who is experiencing poverty, what precise deprivation packages need to be dismantled, and how – so that new actors can easily pick up the information they need to act efficiently, to do more with less. We may be astonished at how steeply poverty can fall given a new wave of imagination, professionalism and quiet human regard.’
The Impact Awards are supported by the University of Oxford’s ESRC Impact Acceleration Account, in partnership with Oxford Brookes University.
