Sabina Alkire

Sabina Alkire is an American academic and Anglican priest, who is the director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), an economic research centre within the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, England, which was established in 2007. She is a fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association. She has worked with organizations such as the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, the United Nations Human Development Programme Human Development Report Office, the European Commission, and the UK's Department for International Development.

Alkire and fellow OPHI member economist James Foster developed the Alkire Foster Method, a method of measuring multidimensional poverty. It includes identifying 'who is poor' by considering the range of deprivations they suffer, and aggregating that information to reflect societal poverty. The application and implementation of the Alkire-Foster (AF) method produced a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), a tool to identify the range of poverty among a population based on specified indicators.

Biography Born in Göttingen, West Germany, she left to the United States of America as a baby when her father took up a role teaching chemical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Alkire studied at the same university, graduating in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology and pre-medicine. Afterwards, Alkire moved to England and attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where she obtained a diploma of theology with a distinction in Islam in 1992, then a Master of Philosophy in Christian political ethics and a Master of Science in economics for development in 1994 and 1995, respectively. was later published as a monograph with the title Valuing Freedoms: Sen's Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (2002).

From 1999 to 2001, Alkire worked as the coordinator for Culture and Poverty Learning-Research Program, PREM, World Bank. for the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report.

In May 2020, Alkire was awarded the Boris Mints Institute Prize for Research of Strategic Policy Solutions to Global Challenges for her contribution to the understanding of the dynamics and implications of poverty. Alkire's research interests include, multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, welfare economics, the capability approach, and the measurement of freedoms and human development.