Belen Gatica

It’s a simple premise: private companies want to help reduce poverty, and they want to know how.

For over a decade, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) has developed tools to identify and tackle ‘multidimensional’ poverty – that is, deprivations experienced at the individual and household levels, including health, education and living standards.

Out of that award-winning work came SOPHIA: Oxford University’s first social enterprise. SOPHIA takes the approaches developed by OPHI and makes them available to businesses that want to make an impact on their employees’ wellbeing.

SOPHIA Oxford is pleased to announce that it is one of the 10 social ventures that Oxford University innovation is highlighting for its work in bringing an innovative and effective response to social challenges.

When you hear the word poverty, ¿what concepts or meanings come your mind? ¿How would you define if a person is poor or not? Questions like these are the ones that led to redesign a new concept of poverty in the world, a concept that is far from referring only to a monetary shortage, and that seeks to make obsolete the notion conceived so far.

Poverty reduction is not just at a crossroads, but as a consequence of the pandemic at a hole in the road that governments alone cannot fill.