Professor Sabina Alkire at the Bodley Club

We are delighted to welcome Professor Sabina Alkire to talk at the Bodley Club at Merton College on 25 November. Sabina Alkire is the Professor of Poverty and Human Development and directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. Together with Professor James Foster, Sabina developed the Alkire-Foster (AF) method for measuring multidimensional poverty, a flexible technique that can incorporate different dimensions, or aspects of poverty, to create measures tailored to each context. With colleagues at OPHI this has been applied and implemented empirically to produce a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). The MPI offers a tool to identify who is poor by considering the range of deprivations they suffer. It is used to report a headline figure of poverty (the MPI), which can be unpacked to provide a detailed information platform for policy design showing how people are poor nationally, and how they are poor by areas, groups, and by each indicator. Sabina was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK 2021 and was voted one of the top 100 thinkers by Forbes magazine in 2010. She currently is the Vincentian Chair of Social Justice 2024-25 at St John's University, and an Ordinary Academician on the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The Bodley Club was founded in 1894 as a literary discussion group, but has over the years developed into Merton College's speaker society. The only criterion for selecting speakers is that they should be "fabulously interesting", and the Club hosts prominent individuals from all fields, including authors, scientists, and other public figures.