The 2025 Social Sciences Impact Awards celebrate social science colleagues of all career stages across the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University who are making significant contributions to society or the economy through meaningful collaboration with non-academic partners. The award winners were announced yesterday at a ceremony at Worcester College.

The Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) won the ‘Scaling & Sustaining Impact’ award for their work addressing multidimensional poverty in developing nations through measurement and policy applications. 

Since 2021, OPHI has partnered with 15 countries to release new national Multidimensional Poverty Indices as official poverty statistics for the first time: data that enables nations to develop the targeted public policies to address the causes of poverty. Through extensive collaboration with policy actors and meaningful capacity building, OPHI’s work has now informed public policy activities in over 40 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, opening up opportunities for better outcomes for over 3 billion people – delivering impact on a truly international scale. 

Watch a film about the team’s impact. 

The ‘Developing Impact’ award for the Young Lives team recognises their work in Peru, helping to bring about a change in the law to prohibit child marriage.

Between 2013 and 2022, over 4,350 child marriages involving girls between the ages of 11 and 17 years were registered in Peru. Almost all (98%) of these resulted in young girls being married to adult men. In September 2022, while presenting a Parliamentary Bill to the Peruvian Congress advocating for the end of child marriage, Congresswoman Flor Pablo directly cited Young Lives research. This, combined with extensive engagement with policymakers, media, and the production of compelling media – such as the Second Chances: Young Marriage, Parenthood and Cohabitation animation – by the Young Lives team, led to the introduction of new legislation in November 2023 to prohibit all marriages with minors under the age of 18 in Peru.

Watch a film about the team’s impact.

Find out more about the Social Sciences Impact Awards.