Prof Sabina Alkire

Sabina Alkire is the Professor of Poverty and Human Development and directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. Previously, she worked at the George Washington University, Harvard University, the Human Security Commission, and the World Bank. She has a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford.

Together with Professor James Foster, Sabina developed the Alkire-Foster (AF) method for measuring multidimensional poverty, a flexible technique that can incorporate different dimensions, or aspects of poverty, to create measures tailored to each context. With colleagues at OPHI this has been applied and implemented empirically to produce a Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). The MPI offers a tool to identify who is poor by considering the range of deprivations they suffer. It is used to report a headline figure of poverty (the MPI), which can be unpacked to provide a detailed information platform for policy design showing how people are poor nationally, and how they are poor by areas, groups, and by each indicator.

From 2024-2025, Sabina was the Vincentian Chair of Social Justice at St John's University in New York, and in 2025 she received an honorary degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK in 2021 and was voted one of the top 100 thinkers by Forbes magazine in 2010. Sabina is currently an Ordinary Academician on the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and sits on the Expert Panel of the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG). She is a member of the Committee for Development Policy (CDP), a subsidiary body of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the UN. In 2025, Sabina was awarded Bhutan’s National Order of Merit (Gold) in recognition of her longstanding commitment to advancing wellbeing in Bhutan and around the world. She was appointed Guest Professor of the Business School at Beijing Normal University 2026–2031.