Colombia is at the forefront globally in multidimensional poverty measurement. Not only was the country a pioneer in creating the national Multidimensional Poverty Index for Colombia (CO-MPI), Colombia also uses this indicator to better monitor poverty goals and the Sustainable Development Goals. Sabina Alkire, Director of OPHI, spoke about these issues with former President Juan Manuel Santos, who is currently a visiting professor at the Department of International Development of Oxford University.

The MPI of El Salvador (MPI-ES) was launched in 2015 after a broad participatory process that involved academics, politicians, and people living in poverty. We spoke to Jimmy Vásquez, who was on the team that led the process for creating the MPI-ES.

James Foster is a co-creator of the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke class of measures, one of the most commonly used methodologies for estimating income poverty. He is also the co-author of the Alkire-Foster methodology, a method for measuring multidimensional poverty that has been adopted by the United Nations Development Programme as well as a number of countries.

Frances Stewart is Professor Emeritus of Development Economics at the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID). She was Director of ODID from 1993-2003 and Director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) at the department between 2003 and 2010. Professor Stewart is a member of OPHI’s Advisory Committee.

María Emma Santos is the co-author, along with Sabina Alkire, of the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), published by UNDP and OPHI since 2010. She is a researcher of the National Scientific and Technological Research Council of Argentina (CONICET), based at the Institute of Economic and Social Research of the South (IIES), Department of Economics, National University of the South (UNS), Argentina, and a research associate at OPHI at the University of Oxford.