Sabina Alkire

Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), a research center within the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, welfare economics, Amartya Sen’s capability approach, the measurement of freedoms, and human development.

She is known for developing, with James Foster, the widely used “Alkire Foster Method” for measuring multi-dimensional poverty for the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report. 

Alkire’s publications include Valuing Freedoms: Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (Oxford University Press, 2005) and the edited volumes Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2015) and The Capability Approach: Concepts, Measures and Applications (Cambridge University Press, 2008), in addition to numerous articles in economics and philosophy.

Previously a researcher for the United Nations Commission on Human Security, chaired by Amartya Sen, she holds a DPhil in economics from Magdalen College, University of Oxford.