Oxford has been awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for its anti-poverty work. The award was presented to the university by Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace last month.
Oxford gained the accolade due to its development of a multidimensional measure for poverty. The multidimensional index offers a more comprehensive approach to poverty by measuring the various ways poor people suffer in their everyday, not just their income.
According to the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), “A person who is poor can suffer from multiple disadvantages at the same time – for example they may have poor health or malnutrition, a lack of clean water or electricity, poor quality of work or little schooling. Focusing on one factor alone, such as income, is not enough to capture the true reality of poverty.”
OPHI, a research centre in the Oxford Department of International Development, is headed by Dr Sabina Alkire, who developed the multidimensional approach alongside Professor James Foster.
Dr Alkire said: “When poor persons, who are the real experts on this subject, explain what poverty is, they articulate multiple disadvantages such as lack of good education, joblessness, poor health, insecurity, ramshackle housing or inadequate sanitation. A multidimensional measure of poverty reflects the lived experiences of impoverished people – and enables actions that redress multiple deprivations.” She also said OPHI was “delighted to receive this prize”.
Alkire and Foster’s method has been applied to both national and international poverty measures. An OPHI spokesperson said: “Whilst OPHI is interested in multidimensional poverty measurement in high-income countries such as the UK, OPHI’s focus to date has been on measuring multidimensional poverty in low- and middle-income countries around the world so that policymakers can tackle it efficiently and effectively.”
OPHI has used this method to help develop Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, which measures non-traditional aspects of culture and well-being, and the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, which measures the agency and inclusion of women in the sector.
Speaking to Cherwell, the spokesperson added: “OPHI will continue to promote, develop and help implement official permanent national multidimensional poverty indices in countries around the world, and their use by high-level policy leaders, in order to harness both data and political will to tackle poverty in all its forms and dimensions.”
The Anniversary Prize is awarded every two years for outstanding research work. The award is managed by the Royal Anniversary Trust, which praised OPHI’s method as “a unique framework for tackling global poverty”.
