Monday, April 12, 2021
10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
via Zoom
The session presented the final proposal for the revised Arab Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) framework, as a result of technical work undertaken by ESCWA, OPHI and the League of Arab States (LAS), and consultations with partner organizations. This revised Arab MPI was endorsed during the 40th ministerial session of the LAS Social Ministerial Council on 17 December 2020, as a basis for the forthcoming Arab Poverty Report. The presentation layed out the process leading up to the formal endorsement, the structure of the revised Arab MPI – its two pillars, and their dimensions and individual indicators – and the preliminary estimates of multidimensional poverty in 11 Arab countries using the revised index. The session also presented a brief introduction about the MPI Assist Tool.
Meet the Presenter:
Ms. Sama El Hage Sleiman is a Statistician at ESCWA since 2015. She is also an epidemiologist and an Actuary by training. Previously, she has served as a statistical consultant and a university lecturer for more than 7 years. At ESCWA, her research interest focuses on multidimensional poverty and other composite indicators in the Arab region, such as the regional Economic Justice Index and the Egypt Governorate Competitiveness Index. She participated in the development of the Arab MPI, in its conception and revisions. More recently, she designed a web-based tool for computing MPIs, to be officially launched in July 2021. Currently, Ms. El Hage Sleiman is co-leading the Poverty Project as well as the Future of Work Project at ESCWA.
Meet the Discussant:
Xavier Moncero is an economist from the San Francisco de Quito University and Master in Economics from Georgetown University. Since 2015, he has headed of the Social Statistics Unit of ECLAC Statistics Division, whose areas of work include the measurement and analysis of poverty and income distribution, the compilation and harmonization of household surveys and the production and dissemination of social statistics. He coordinated the update of ECLAC methodology of income poverty measurement and is currently leading the work on a regionally comparable multidimensional poverty index for Latin America. He also serves as coordinator of the Statistical Conference of the Americas.
About the Event Series
The Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP) at George Washington University and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), with the support of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report office (UNDP HDRO), are pleased to host a special seminar series on the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (global MPI). Goal 1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to end poverty in all its forms and dimensions. The global MPI 2020 offers a tool to make progress towards this goal.
Produced in partnership with the UNDP HDRO, the global MPI 2020 compares acute multidimensional poverty for 107 countries in developing regions and provides a detailed image of who is poor and how they are poor. It offers both a global headline and a fine-grained analysis covering 1,279 sub-national regions, and important disaggregation such as children, and people living in urban or rural areas, together with the indicator deprivations of each group. Bringing together the academic and policy spheres, this series of seminars will highlight topics such as sensitivity analyses, overlapping deprivations, changes over time (poverty trends), and inequality using the global data. The sessions will also include work that applies the global MPI methodology, the Alkire Foster method, to innovative measures.
The seminars are taking place online on Mondays at 10 a.m. EST. They will be hosted by IIEP Co-Director Professor James Foster and are open to everyone focused on improving the lived experience of those who are deprived.
