Missing Data for Poverty and Human Development Research

Multidimensional Poverty Comparison

Oxford Human Development Initiative

Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford

29 May – 1 June 2007

Participant Biographies

Richard Alkire

Richard Alkire is Charles J. and Dorothy G. Prizer Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Lifetime National Associate of the National Academy of the U.S. He has received various awards in his professional and academic career such as the Carl Wagner Memorial Award by the Electrochemical Society (1985), Professional Progress Award by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (1985), Excellence in Teaching Award by the School of Chemical Sciences of the University of Illinois (1988), George Washington Kidd Outstanding Alumnus Award by Lafayette College (1988), Technical Achievement Award by the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (1990), E.V. Murphee Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry by the Americn Chemical Society (1991), Edward Goodrich Acheson Medal by the Electrochemical Society (1996) and the Vittorio de Nora Award by the Electrochemical Society (2005).

Sabina Alkire

Sabina Alkire is a Research Fellow at Queen Elizabeth House and at the Global Equity Initiative, Harvard, and Secretary of the Human Development and Capability Associations. Her publications include Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction, as well as articles. Research interests include value judgements in economic decision-making, the conceptualization and measurement of individual agency freedoms (empowerment) particularly in South Asia, and further development of the capability approach by the academic, policy, and activist communities. Previously she worked for the Commission on Human Security, the World Bank, and Oxfam and the Asia Foundation in Pakistan. She holds a DPhil in Economics, an MSc in Economics for Development and an MPhil in Christian political ethics from Magdalen College, Oxford.

Sudhir Anand

Sudhir Anand is Professor of Economics and Fellow of St. Catherine’s College at the University of Oxford. Sudhir Anand is a world recognized development microeconomist. He has published widely on inequality, poverty, and undernutrition; human development; population ethics; health economics; and the theory and measurement of economic inequality. After finishing graduate studies, Professor Anand joined the Faculty of Economics at Oxford University, where he is currently Professor of Economics. He was on the faculty at the Harvard University School of Public Health as a Visiting Professor in 1993-94, and as Adjunct Professor thereafter. From 1997 to 1999, he served as Acting Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies where he led a research initiative exploring the theory and measurement of health equity. Professor Anand recently chaired the WHO committee on global health systems performance assessment. He received his MA in mathematics and D.Phil. in economics from the University of Oxford.

Tony Atkinson

Sir Tony Atkinson currently holds a Blaise Pascal Research Chair in Paris. He was Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford from1994 to 2005. Previously, he was successively Professor of Economics at Essex University, University College London, the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. He served as a member of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, the Pension Law Review Committee, and the Social Justice Commission. His books includeThe Economics of Inequality, Lectures on Public Economics (with Joseph Stiglitz) and, most recently, The EU and Social Inclusion: Facing the Challenges (with Beatrijs Cantillon and Eric Marlier).

Grace Bediako

Grace Bediako is Chief of the Demographic Statistics Division, Demographic and Social Statistics Branch of the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD).

Afsan Bhedalia

Afsan Bhedalia is Research Assistant to Sabina Alkire. Afsan recently finished a Masters in nutrition at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition with a concentration in humanitarian assistance and nutrition interventions. She also received a certificate in Humanitarian Studies from the Humanitarian Studies Initiative (HSI), an inter-university program at Harvard, MIT and Tufts. Afsan holds a Bachelors in Biology and International Relations, also from Tufts University. She is interested in how the capability approach and the concept of human security can be applied to create more equitable global health systems.

Francois Bourguignon

Francois Bourguignon is Chief Economist of the World Bank Unit in South Asia Region.

Alex Butchart

Dr. Alexander Butchart is the Prevention of Violence Coordinator in the Department of Injuries and Violence Prevention at the World Health Organization. His responsibilities include coordinating the Global Campaign for Violence Prevention, the development of policy for the prevention of interpersonal violence, preparation of guidelines for the prevention of specific types of interpersonal violence, and the co-ordination of research into various aspects of interpersonal violence and its prevention. Prior to joining WHO he worked mainly in Southern and Central Africa, where he was lead scientist of the South African Violence and Injury Surveillance Consortium and in collaboration with the Uganda-based Injury Prevention Initiative for Africa participated in training violence and injury prevention workers from a number of African countries. He has been a visiting scientist at the Swedish Karolinska Institutet's Division of Social Medicine, and is a widely published social scientist.

Tania Burchardt

Tania Burchardt is Academic Fellow of the Suntory And Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD) of the London School of Economics. Her research interests include theories of social justice, including the capability approach, employment, welfare and exclusion and equality and inequality in Britain. Her current research projects are on time and income poverty, health, wealth and consumption among the elderly and mental health and social exclusion.

Achin Chakraborty

Achin Chakraborty is Professor of Economics at the Institute of Development Studies at Kolkata University and his current work centres on what may be called “non-welfaristic” issues in welfare economics.

Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti

Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti is a Professor at the Dipartimento Economia Pubblica e TerritorialeUniversità di Pavia, and Director of the Human Development and Capability International Research Centre which opened November 2005, also at the University of Pavia. She is vice president of the Human Development and Capability Association, and organised the 2003 and 2004 conferences (the HDCA was launched at the 2004 conference). Research interests include capability measurement making use of fuzzy set theory, fuzzy logic, complexity and vagueness, as well as gender issues and the capability approach.

David Alexander Clark

David Clark is Research Associate at the Global Poverty Research Group of Institute for Development Policy and Management of the University of Manchester. He is also Visiting Scholar at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge and Research Associate of the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town.

Séverine Deneulin

Séverine Deneulin is lecturer in Economics and International Development at the University of Bath. Her research specialisation is in development theory, especially Amartya Sen’s capability approach, and the interaction between theory and policy. Her writings have questioned ‘freedom-based’ approaches to development in addressing poverty, and have argued for a more historical and structural perspective on development theory. She has also researched on the political role of faith communities in the U.K. She is currently exploring the concept of the ‘common good’ and its relevance for international development. She is a member of the Human Development and Capability Association ( co-editor of its newsletter and convener of the thematic group ‘religion and human development’. She has conducted research in Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and East London. She was formerly a Research Associate at the Von Hügel Institute, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. She holds a D.Phil. in Development Studies from the University of Oxford and a M.A. in Economics from the University of Louvain (Belgium).

Rachael Diprose

Tracy Fenwick

Tracy Fenwick is a DPhil candidate in Politics at the University of Oxford. She is currently based in Argentina where she is studying systems of devolution and the power of local government.

James Foster

James Foster is Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University. Mr. Foster joined Vanderbilt in 1990 after a decade as a faculty member in the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University. He has held visiting positions at Cornell and the University of Essex (England) and recently spent a research leave at Cornell and NYU. Mr Foster’s main research interests are mainly in microeconomics, with special emphasis on measurement issues related to distribution of income and well-being. Work in progress includes papers on: measuring health inequality (with R. A. Allison), measuring literacy (with Kaushik Basu), group identity and inequality (with Ravi Kanbur), comparing investment projects (with Tapan Mitra), and decomposable inequality measures (with Artyom Shneerov). Mr. Foster is a core member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Network on Inequality and Poverty in a Broader Perspective.

Sarah Gibbons

Sarah Gibbons is Manager of the Report on the Status of Pastoralism (ROSP) at Oxfam GB.

Björn Sörgen Gigler

Björn Sören Gigler is a political economist who has worked since the early 1990s on issues related to indigenous peoples, sustainable development and ICT for development with a focus on Latin America. Since 1997 he has worked as a social development consultant and ICT for development specialist at the World Bank. He currently holds the position of Associate Researcher at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University and is a PhD candidate at the Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics (LSE), United Kingdom. He has taught courses and carried out research on political economy, international development and ICT for Development at the London School of Economics (2003-2004), Universidad Católica Boliviana, Bolivia (2005), the Universidad los Andes, Colombia (1997) and Oberlin College (1991-1992). Sören’s main research field is the perspective of indigenous peoples on human well-being and development and the role ICT can play in enhancing poor peoples’ livelihoods. He is particularly interested in operationalizing Amartya Sen’s capability approach and to apply it to indigenous peoples in the Latin American context. He is also the coordinator of the Indigenous Peoples Thematic Team of the Human Development and Capability Association ( He has published several articles and two book chapters on indigenous peoples development, the capability approach, the concept of information poverty and ICT for empowerment and development.

Ian Goldin

Ian Goldin was appointed as the first Director of Oxford University’s James Martin 21st Century School on September 1, 2006. As Director, Dr Goldin will lead the School to provide solutions to the great challenges of our time. The School initially is composed of ten University Institutes drawing together leading scholars from across the University. It covers the frontiers of physical, medical and biological science as well as climate change and environmental science, the social sciences and the humanities. Under the Director’s guidance, the School aims to become the leading global centre of research and applied policy analysis on the key challenges of the 21st Century.

From January 2001 to August 2006, Dr Goldin was at the World Bank, first as Director of Development Policy, and from 2003-2006 as Vice President. As Director of Development Policy he provided policy and management leadership, contributing to the Bank’s renewed focus on poverty and support for the Millennium Development Goals. He played a catalytic role in the development of the Bank’s research on trade, infrastructure and migration. On becoming Vice President, Ian became an active member of the Bank’s senior management team, with particular responsibility for the Bank’s relationship with all developed countries, and for key institutional relationships, including with the United Nations.

Jaqui Goldin

Jaqui Goldin is Director of the African Water Issues Research Unit (AWIRU) at the Centre for International Political Studies, University of Pretoria. Jaqui’s work with AWIRU focuses on the development of scientific understanding of the role of water as a source of socio-economic and political stability.

Reikho Gotoh

Reikho Gotoh is Professor of Economic Philosophy at the Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Ritsumeinkan University. Her research is focused on reconstructing Welfare Economics by extending the ideas of the social choice theory which goes beyond the logic of the market price mechanism and which proposes an ethic of making value systems considering a viewpoint of justice.

John Hammock

John Hammock is the Alexander N. McFarlane Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy & The Fletcher School, Tufts University. He was the former Executive Director of Oxfam America (1984-95); former Executive Director of ACCION International (1973-80); Founder and former Director of the Feinstein International Famine Centre at Tufts University; as well as consultant with Women's World Banking and USAID. From August 2006 he will be moving to the Global Equity Initiative, Harvard University, to advance communications and advocacy related to the Human Development and Capability Approach.

Barbara Harriss-White

Barbara Harriss-White is University Professor of Development Studies and Director of Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. She describes herself as a field economist, specialising in South Asia, interested in markets, long term regional capitalist transformation and social structures of accumulation on the one hand and social welfare (particularly gendered life chances, nutrition, disability, poverty, social security) on the other.

Anna Hiltunen

Anna Hiltunen is Project Coordinator of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. She holds a Master's Degree in Health Sciences. After doing an internship with UNICEF and WFP she worked in feeding programmes in Zimbabwe and in Darfur. Before joining OPHI she was with Oxfam GB and a part of the Emergency Capacity Building Project, collaboration between seven biggest NGOs in the humanitarian sector.

John Hood

Dr John Hood was admitted as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford on 5 October 2004. He is the first person in the institution's 900 year history to be elected to the Vice-Chancellorship from outside the University's current academic body.

Before coming to Oxford, Dr. Hood was for five and a half years Vice-Chancellor of the University of Auckland. During his time there, he served on a number of external bodies, including the New Zealand Vice-Chancellors' Committee, of which he was Chairman from 2002-2004; the Knowledge Wave Trust, which he also chaired; and Universitas 21 Limited and Universitas 21 Global, of which he was a Director. He was also a Member of the Prime Minister's Growth and Innovation Advisory Board and of the Prime Minister's Enterprise Council; New Zealand Secretary for The Rhodes Trust; Trustee of the Asia 2000 Foundation; and a Governor and Trustee of the King's School. Dr Hood has also been a Director of ASB Bank Limited and ASB Group, and of the Fonterra Co-operative Group Ltd, and Chairman of Tonkin & Taylor Ltd.

Prior to his return to academia, Dr. Hood spent 18 years with one of New Zealand’s largest companies, Fletcher Challenge Ltd. He held a number of senior positions at the company and headed, at various times, its Paper, Building and Construction arms. His experience of international business covers Australasia, the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific Island countries. Dr Hood has also been a strategic consultant to a number of major corporations.

Dr Hood has also been influential in the world of sport, chairing the America's Cup Task Force and acting as a Governor and Executive Board Member of the New Zealand Sports Foundation. In 1995 he was engaged by New Zealand Cricket to chair its major operational, strategic and governance review of the sport; and in 1996 he chaired the Prime Minister's Think-Tank on High Performance Sport.

Dr Hood took a BE and a PhD in Civil Engineering at the University of Auckland. He then came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar to read for an MPhil in Management Studies. As well as his extensive industry experience, he has also been a Visiting Senior Lecturer in Auckland's Department of Civil Engineering.

David Hulme

David Hulme is Professor in Economics and Director of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre at Institute for Development Policy and Management at the University of Manchester. His specific research interests include rural development policy and planning, poverty reduction strategies, finance for the poor, sociology of development, role of community organisations and NGOs, evaluation of technical assistance, environmental management and public sector reform.

Solava Ibrahim

Kim Samuel Johnson

Kim Samuel Johnson is Director of the Samuel Group of Companies. Through her various endeavours in her family business, family foundation and independent relationships with several international non-government organizations, Kim Samuel-Johnson displays a passion for and dedication to creating positive, sustainable social change. She is specifically committed to eradicating poverty by building capacity at the community level, making education a basic human right for all the world's children, empowering the family as the core societal unit for stability and development, and pursuing environmental sustainability as an integral human value.