The OPHI Summer School is held annually in different locations around the world. It 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 is 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 the 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. Students develop the skills required to construct and analyse a multidimensional poverty measure and 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 is presented, as well as the full suite of measurement tools. 

The following topics are covered: 

• Unidimensional poverty measures; 
• Multidimensional poverty measures and methodologies; 
• The Alkire-Foster (AF) method of multidimensional poverty measurement; 
• Measurement design – purpose, dimensions, indicators, cutoffs and weights; 
• Estimation of multidimensional poverty and interpretation of the results; 
• Subgroup decomposition and dimensional break-down; 
• Multidimensional poverty changes over time; 
• Interpretation and analysis of multidimensional poverty. 

Course format 

The Summer School is a full-time course taught in English and consists of two full weeks of instruction and working group sessions. Throughout the Summer School, participants are actively involved in discussions and work through problem sets in virtual or in-person small groups, using Stata. They will also have the opportunity to attend lectures and Q&A sessions with OPHI Director Sabina Alkire and OPHI researchers.