Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) is a global organization focused on utilizing scholarship to influence policy and public attitudes to poverty.
We do so by:
- Advancing collaboration among poverty-focused academics, with an emphasis on South-North connections;
- Promoting effective outreach to policy makers and broader public audiences; and
- Helping academics pursue applied research and intervention projects, as well as campaigns on specific issues.
ASAP’s overarching aim is to contribute to the eradication of severe poverty worldwide, by ensuring that poverty policy and development efforts are guided by rigorous empirical and normative scholarship. Our principal focus is on poor people in less affluent countries, because that is where poverty tends to be the most concentrated and severe, and where resources for tackling it tend to be scarcer. However, our ultimate concern is for people, not for countries, and so we are also concerned with poor people in affluent countries.
ASAP recognizes that poverty is a process, not a static given. Our members explore a wide range of factors in their analyses of poverty, and promote a variety of solutions. With such diversity in mind, ASAP does not offer a narrow poverty analysis, but seeks to promote robust dialogue informed by substantial research from all regions of the world.
Finally, ASAP’s theory of social change focuses on both institutions and norms. Thus, we seek both to promote sound and progressive poverty policy at the domestic and global levels, and to help change norms around the acceptability of severe poverty. Inspired by how engaged academics helped transform views on civil rights, the US war in Vietnam, apartheid and lately gender inequality and violence, ASAP holds that we can help achieve a decisive shift of views on poverty and poor people worldwide.
To read more about the motivation for ASAP, please see this article by Thomas Pogge and Luis Cabrera. For an overview of the historical development of ASAP, have a look at this essay written by Keith Horton.
For more information about the people involved in ASAP, please also see our board members and officers, our advisory board and our staff and volunteers.