NEWS
& MEDIA
About our work, team and partners
MEDIA COVERAGE
- Facing The Poverty Tsunami: How Business Can Support the Lives, Livelihoods and Access to Learning of the Most Vulnerable People and Communities
- bMPI supporting the private sector to achieve the eradication of multidimensional poverty in Costa Rica
- New Citi GPS Report: Eliminating Poverty, a $1.6 Trillion Opportunity to Improve the Lives of Millions
- Eight companies in Costa Rica receive an award for progress in poverty reduction using the business MPI
- Incorporating gender into the Business Multidimensional Poverty Index: The Wise Responder initiative
Articles & News

Robust social metrics for ESG investing: A practical way for boards to invest for impact
Almost two trillion dollars is being invested in ESG investment vehicles annually. And yet to date the instruments for investing

New Citi GPS Report: Eliminating Poverty, a $1.6 Trillion Opportunity to Improve the Lives of Millions
LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions (GPS) has released a report titled “ELIMINATING POVERTY — The importance of a Multidimensional

SOPHIA Oxford and KOMUNIKA LATAM sign alliance
SOPHIA Oxford and KOMUNIKA LATAM sign alliance to support companies to promote the well-being of their employees

SOPHIA Oxford launches the Wise Responder Action Kit
SOPHIA Oxford launches the Wise Responder Action Kit for “Already Committed” companies in Latin America and the Caribbean to tackle social challenges, in COVID impacted world, faced by their employees and their families.
Companies are already embracing Environmental, Social and Governance – ESG — goals and measurement. What these companies need are tangible tools that integrate with their systems. They want better data to make better decisions for better investments for better impact.

Oxford University Innovation invites investment in SOPHIA
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.

Incorporating gender into the Business Multidimensional Poverty Index: The Wise Responder initiative
SOPHIA Oxford has developed a technological tool for businesses to collect and analyse data on the deprivations faced by employees and their families. This tool allows a company to conduct an online census of its employees, and analyse the data collected. The tool implements the Wise Responder questionnaire, which collects information on all deprivation indicators included in the national measure of multidimensional poverty, on income, on debt and a few additional questions to assess the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on the household. The Wise Responder questionnaire also includes questions aimed at capturing gender gaps.

Oxford Highlights SOPHIA’s Work to Create Employee 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.

Multidimensional Poverty and Vulnerability to COVID-19
Using data from the Global MPI 2020, with IDRC support OPHI has written two policy briefs on the overlaps of the global MPI data and COVID. One focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, as is now available. A similar paper will be published shortly on Latin America.
The published report on sub-Saharan Africa is entitled Multidimensional Poverty and Vulnerability to COVID-19: A Rapid Overview of Disaggregated and Interlinked Vulnerabilities in Sub-Saharan Africa. This briefing provides evidence on the situation across 479 subnational regions and 40 countries of sub-Saharan Africa. It maps some simultaneous deprivations that people are already facing so that policy actors can adjust their COVID-19 responses based on differing levels of vulnerability

What is MULTIDIMENSIONAL
POVERTY?
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.

High-Level Side Event UNGA 2020
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.

Keeping Poverty Reduction Front and Center
The latest update to the global Multidimensional Poverty Index shows that many countries have made significant progress in improving the lives of the poor over the past decade. Rather than allow these gains to be reversed by the COVID-19 pandemic, governments must seize this moment to redouble their efforts. By Juan Manuel Santos , Sabina Alkire.

The MPI has come of age, should shape the new dawn
While Covid-19 is sometimes referred to as a great leveller, the MPI may open our eyes to the reality that many are buried below the scale, like blacks in the US.
We will see similar patterns in South Africa when the effects of our racial past and our tinkering with development rear their heads.

Oxford launches poverty-fighting vehicle
Oxford University has been testing out a new poverty-fighting vehicle in Costa Rica that helps companies to identify and tackle hidden poverty in their workforce. Co-founder John Hammock spoke to the FT’s Andrew Jack about the scope and aims of the initiative.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2019. All rights reserved

Poverty research wins Oxford prestigious Queen’s Anniversary Prize
The University of Oxford is among 22 UK educational institutions announced as winners of Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for research carried out by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).
Her Majesty The Queen approved the award of Queen’s Anniversary Prizes in the thirteenth round of the scheme.

Oxford University launches social enterprise to help business fight poverty
Researchers from the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) have launched sOPHIa Oxford, the University’s first social enterprise spinout, to bring a multidimensional poverty-fighting method created by OPHI to businesses to help efforts to tackle poverty.