OPHI Advanced Course: Frequently Asked Questions

A person's lived experience of poverty goes beyond lack of money. When we capture the multiple deprivations that poor people experience simultaneously, it enhances our understanding of the lived realities of poverty. For example, a person might lack access to clean drinking water and face barriers to education or employment at the same time. Multidimensional poverty measurement helps us prioritise the most vulnerable, inform multisectoral policymaking, and reveal poverty which would otherwise be overlooked by monetary measures. 

Multidimensional poverty is explicitly recognised in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals - namely, Target 1.2 that requires all governments by 2030: "[to] reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions.” 

Whether you are researching poverty or working on poverty eradication, it is important to understand how the different dimensions of poverty affect people’s lives. Which groups are most affected by multidimensional poverty? Are marginalised groups being left behind? Are poverty policies and programmes achieving their goals? The OPHI Advanced Course will provide poverty researchers and policymakers with the skills and techniques to address these important questions and take the next step in multidimensional poverty analysis. 

No single indicator can capture the true complexity of poverty. To achieve international development objectives like the Sustainable Development Goals, we need to combine the efforts of a range of groups within and across countries. When public institutions work with each other, and with private sector, academia or civil society, our development efforts are enhanced. Multidimensional poverty measurement engages all these groups and more in tackling poverty. In the OPHI Advanced Course, you will learn how to inform and shape interactions between different sectors through academic tools, to work towards poverty eradication together.

On the OPHI Advanced Course, you will learn: 

• How to correctly estimate, interpret and monitor changes in the MPI and its related indices over time 

• How to analyse differences in multidimensional poverty between household members, particularly between different genders and age groups 

• How to create and analyse MPIs which are adjusted for vulnerable populations, including children and women, and link these to existing metrics 

• How to map, analyse and visualize connections between different indicators in an MPI, and use this information to inform policies 

• How an MPI can inform policymaking, and the different approaches to impact evaluation, simulations, budgeting, and targeting using the MPI 

The course will consist of one full week of in-person teaching at the University of Oxford. You will hear lectures from MPI experts about advanced methods in multidimensional measurement and analysis, take part in working groups to apply the advanced methods to your own work through a set of guided exercises in Stata. The course will also provide you with opportunities for networking and interacting with the OPHI team. A designated mini conference session will take place each day, giving you and other participants the opportunity to present your own work and receive feedback from peers as well as OPHI Director Sabina Alkire and the OPHI research team.   

Sabina Alkire is the Professor of Poverty and Human Development and directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. Previously, she worked at the George Washington University, Harvard University, the Human Security Commission, and the World Bank. She has a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford. 

Together with Professor James Foster, Sabina developed the Alkire-Foster (AF) method for measuring multidimensional poverty, a flexible technique that can incorporate different dimensions, or aspects of poverty, to create measures tailored to each context. With colleagues at OPHI this has been applied and implemented empirically to produce a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). The MPI offers a tool to identify who is poor by considering the range of deprivations they suffer. It is used to report a headline figure of poverty (the MPI), which can be unpacked to provide a detailed information platform for policy design showing how people are poor nationally, and how they are poor by areas, groups, and by each indicator. 

Sabina was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK 2021 and was voted one of the top 100 thinkers by Forbes magazine in 2010. She currently is the Vincentian Chair of Social Justice 2024-25 at St John's University, and an Ordinary Academician on the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. 

Ricardo Nogales is an economist specialising in development economics, poverty measurement and analysis, and labour markets. He is a Research Associate at OPHI, a lecturer in economics at Universidad Privada Boliviana and a Fellow of the Global Labour organisation. He holds a PhD in Econometrics from the University of Geneva and has worked alongside several institutions, including UNDP, IDB, OAS and ILO, focusing on multidimensional poverty and human development. His research on these topics is regularly published in top academic journals, including the Journal of Development Economics, World Development, and the Review of Income and Wealth. He has vast experience developing and analysing indices based on the Alkire-Foster method; for more than eight years, he has worked with governments in Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and Francophone Africa to help them develop their national MPIs and use them for policy purposes. Since 2020, he has been the academic co-lead of the OPHI Summer School. 

Fanni Kovesdi is Research & Development Manager at OPHI with over seven years of experience in the measurement and computation of multidimensional poverty indices in global and national contexts. She co-led the first large-scale trends analysis of OPHI’s global Multidimensional Poverty Index for 80 countries, and the first disaggregation of the index by ethnicity. Her current work focuses on advancing the data and measurements landscape of multidimensional poverty and wellbeing in contexts of middle and high human development and expanding the knowledge base on the statistical and policy uses of MPIs, with a focus on Europe and Central Asia. Fanni regularly collaborates with national governments and international agencies and contributes to OPHI publications and research on MPI. Since 2021, she co-led the design and delivery of OPHI’s annual academic summer programme, as well as workshops and seminars for academic and policy practitioners. She is course director for the Advance Course alongside Ricardo Nogales. 

Bios for other lecturers and facilitators will be added soon.  

The OPHI Advanced Course provides the necessary knowledge and skills to take the next step on your MPI journey. Our Summer School teaches you how to construct an MPI. Following on from this, the Advanced Course will teach you how to better understand and analyse your existing MPI data. As you apply the techniques you learn on the course, you will be able to explore if multidimensional poverty affects some groups disproportionately, the role of gender in how households experience poverty, and how poverty is evolving. You will also learn the different ways an MPI can be used for impact evaluation, budgeting and simulations, and informed targeting.