Work by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at ODID has been included in a list of the top 20 most impressive examples of UK research contributing to global development compiled by the UK Collaborative on Development Sciences (UKDCS).

The UKDCS selected the list from the 6,975 impact case studies submitted to the Research Excellence Framework, the system used to assess the research quality of UK universities.

OPHI was recognised for its work to develop the Alkire Foster (AF) method for multidimensional poverty measurement. The AF method is a flexible tool that captures the overlapping deprivations that a person or household experiences in different indicators of poverty, such as poor health, a lack of education and inadequate living standards. It provides a headline measure of poverty and can also be broken down to reveal what poverty is like in different areas of a country and among different groups of the population.

The AF method is being used by a growing number of governments to develop their own national or regional multidimensional poverty measures, incorporating indicators of poverty relevant to their own specific contexts. It enables policy-makers to develop coordinated poverty-reduction initiatives and target their resources at those most in need.

The AF method has also been used to construct the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, which has been calculated by OPHI and published in the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report since 2010. The Global MPI is an internationally comparable measure of acute poverty covering more than 100 developing countries.

• Read the UKCDS case study about OPHI’s work: Revolutionising the world’s understanding of poverty and how to fight it
• Find out more about countries that have launched or are in the process of developing multidimensional poverty measures.