OPHI Summer School 2024: Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis

Overview

The Summer School 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 will be 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 this intensive 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. Upon completing the course, students will have the skills required to construct and analyse a multidimensional poverty measure and will be able to 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 will be presented, as well as the full suite of measurement tools.

Course dates: 1–12 July 2024
Format: In-person
Location: UM6P Rabat

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

  • Understand the conceptual and empirical motivation for measuring multidimensional poverty
  • Understand the Alkire-Foster (AF) method and apply it to compute a multidimensional index
  • Interpret and effectively communicate results, including subgroup decomposition and dimensional breakdown
  • Understand how the multidimensional measure can be used as a policy tool
  • Understand the advantages and limits of different data sources for measuring multidimensional poverty using the Alkire-Foster method
  • Understand the key properties and uses of national and cross-national multidimensional measures (e.g. global MPI)

Structure

The Summer School is a full-time, in-person course taught in English. It consists of two full weeks of instructions, accompanied by working group sessions. Throughout the course, participants will attend lectures and Q&A sessions with OPHI Director Sabina Alkire and OPHI researchers and be actively involved in discussions, and work through problem sets in small groups using Stata.

Entry Requirements

  • A demonstrable knowledge of Stata is an essential pre-requisite for attending the course. This will be assessed as part of the application process.
  • A strong knowledge of quantitative methods and a strong interest in poverty measurement and analysis are highly desirable.
  • The Summer School will be delivered in English so a high level of English language ability is necessary.
  • Participants will need to have their own laptops to access relevant material of the course such as readings, and Stata exercises.