OPHI Summer School on Multidimensional Poverty

OPHI Summer School on Multidimensional Poverty

20-31 July 2026 | San Jose, Costa Rica

Info and registration

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, Professor 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.

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 AF method.

The following topics are covered: 

  • Unidimensional poverty measures;

  • Multidimensional poverty measures;

  • The AF method of multidimensional poverty measurement;

  • Measurement design – purpose, dimensions, indicators, deprivation and poverty cutoffs and weights;

  • Estimation of multidimensional poverty and interpretation of the results;

  • Subgroup decomposition and dimensional break-down;

  • Interpretation and analysis of multidimensional poverty measures.

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

Registration is open until 20 March 2026.

If you have any questions about the course or require help with your application, please contact us on: ophi-summerschool@qeh.ox.ac.uk