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Support Our Fight To End Poverty – ASAP Needs You!

2020-10-06 By ASAP Global

We are a global community of academics dedicated to confronting and transforming rules and practices that perpetuate and aggravate poverty and inequality. At a time of unprecedented challenge and uncertainty, our mission of supporting the most impoverished, marginalised and discriminated, while fighting for a fairer and more just world has never been more critical.

ASAP Global channels its funding through our network of national Chapters who, being at the forefront of the academia-policy interface, are equipped to leverage evidence to effectively advocate and affect change. Your financial support allows us to continue this important work.

How would your contribution help us to tackle the world’s most pressing poverty-related issues?

DONATE NOW

We have recently been approached by a very generous donor, who would like to remain anonymous, but who is offering to match any donations that we receive up to the 31st December 2020 and up to the value of $40,000.

This means that any donation you make today will have double the impact.

Over it’s ten years, ASAP has been a leader championing for change on many fronts of the global poverty problem. Part of our uniqueness is the ability to draw on the expertise of our membership, which includes an extensive array of world class academics from across diverse disciplines. Some of the networks most notable achievements include:

Health Impact Fund

The HIF aims to incentivise the development of new medicines for the global poor by delinking the price of drugs from the cost of research.

The project is led by Thomas Pogge (ASAP founder and Global Board member), and economist Aidan Hollis. 

As currently designed, pharmaceutical markets have a fundamental flaw that mainly affects poor people: the development of new medicines is funded exclusively through markups protected by patents. This flaw causes research neglect of diseases concentrated among the poor. It deprives poor people of access to patented medicines even when these can be mass-produced cheaply. HIF will address this flaw by creating complementary incentives that decouple the price of medicines from the fixed costs of innovation and cover the latter through health impact rewards by encouraging pharmaceutical innovators to register new drugs for participation in ten consecutive annual payouts. Each round of payment is divided among registered products according to health gains achieved the preceding year. These reward payments will enable innovators to recoup their R&D expenses and make appropriate profits while, at the same time, allowing the price of these registered medicines to be capped – covering merely their lowest feasible cost of manufacture and distribution. The result will be more affordable drugs to those in middle and lower income countries.

The first step is a 5 year pilot. Find out more about how the Health Impact Fund is progressing.

Launch of the HIF pilot in Kerala, India

Manifesto Poverty Audits

ASAP has developed a methodology and approach for critically reviewing the impact of policies on poverty levels. Called Poverty Audits, the organisation has over the past five years supported multiple country Chapters to conduct audits around national elections.

ASAP Oceania were the first to pilot the audits in 2013. They produced a ground-breaking assessment looking into the manifestos of the three major Australian political parties. The report sets out the implications of the policies for poverty alleviation in key areas including: education, Indigenous policy, housing, foreign aid, migration and many others. Read the report here. Five years on, in 2018, the Oceania Chapter expanded this work to critically review the Australian Government’s progress towards the SDGs. Called: Australia, Poverty, and the Sustainable Development Goals, the report lays out evidence clearly setting out why further action is needed and makes a series of recommendations. Both reports coordinated experts in multiple dimensions of poverty to write brief, accessible responses to Government policy.

The Poverty Audit approach has also been adopted by ASAP Chapters in the UK and Canada, similarly reviewing the policy platforms of major political parties running during national elections. The UK Audit in 2017 saw 29 academics from 23 Universities analyse the running manifestos of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties on 12 key poverty-related topics. The report gained widespread media attention and acclaim. Find out more about the methodology, the report itself, and listen to ASAP Global Executive Cat Tully talking about the project on the ASAP UK’s poverty audit website.

To build on these past successes, one of the priorities for ASAP Global is to support more Chapters to conduct these innovative appraisals. They are effective means to hold parties and governments to account for their actions to address poverty at home within a country but also towards global commitments, such as through the SDGs.  

Producing the Oslo Principles

In 2012, a group of legal experts from around the world, convened by Dutch Advocate-General Jaap Spier and ASAP co-founder Thomas Pogge set out to answer a pressing climate crisis-related question: how much do human rights and other sources of law require each state to do to reduce emissions, even in the absence of a specific treaty?

Greenhouse gas emissions that were escalating at the time, but that continue to rise at an alarming rate still today, stand to compromise the rights of billions of people around the world. Yet, there was an evident lack of explicit treaties legally binding states to curb their emissions. This was the problem the experts set out to resolve.

After several years of extensive legal research and discussions the group undersigned a set of principles at a meeting in Oslo, Norway, which were adopted in March 2015 as the Oslo Principles on Global Climate Change Obligations. The principles detail how international laws such as human rights law and tort law may already require states to reduce their emissions, irrespective of other specific treaties. This work was subsequently expanded to include an examination of the obligations of private enterprises to prevent climate change. Find out more about the impact of these initiatives on the Global Justice Programme website at Yale University.

Redefining Migration Discourse

In June 2019, ASAP Global in partnership with Club de Madrid and Global Justice Now, held a colloquium that brought together a focussed group of interdisciplinary specialists from academia, policy and civil society.

Much of the global narrative around migration seeks to perpetuate dishonest and emotive narratives that distort wider public understandings and cast migrants as negative and disruptive influences on economies and social order. The event aimed to bring together expert knowledge to understand how we can create a significant shift in the positioning of the migration debate.

The panel discussed how current accounts of migration are grounded in deep structural inequalities. Therefore, there is a need to reframe public policy and discourse towards a more sympathetic environment for migration that focuses on the universality of humans. It would encourage a politics of kindness and should be much more closely connected with wider global issues associated with development and the distribution of capital.

To build on the success of the London event we are currently organising a series of follow up workshops that will explore what a more positive migrant discourse looks like and how, as a network, we can use this to shape recommendations that can transform political and public perceptions of migrants.

The Future of ASAP

2020 is an exciting time for the ASAP network. Interest in our work is rapidly growing, not only at the membership level for established Chapters but also new Chapters which we currently see growing in six new countries.

At the same time, we are in the genesis of working with country leads to create a programme of inter-Chapter collaborative research projects for 2021. These stand to produce cutting edge evidence on the most pressing poverty problems the world is facing.

Your donation will enable us to carry out this vital work. From the ASAP Network family, THANK YOU.

Filed Under: Announcements, Calls, Events

Webinar: Feminization Of Poverty In Venezuela

2020-10-05 By ASAP Global

Friday, October 16, 10:00am Caracas time (-5hrs BST).

Poverty hits women harder than men. Globally, women are paid on average 24% less than men, work longer hours and do twice as much unpaid work within the home (Oxfam). COVID-19 has worsened this situation, and by 2030 poverty levels are expected to increase by 12.6% among women, twice as much as among men (6.6%) (UN Women). Focusing on Latin America, we find that over 51% of poor people are women and one in three women have no income of their own. Here too, COVID-19 has come to accentuate this problem, standing to set the region back 10 years in terms of women’s participation in the labour market, as high-risk sectors (restaurants, retail, entertainment) account for around 57.2% of female employment (ECLAC).

In Venezuela, the situation is alarming. There has been a 70% fall in GDP between 2013 and 2019 and the average daily income is less than 1 dollar – USD $0.72. Of the 1 million people who have been forced to leave the country annually since 2017, men predominate. This means millions of women have been left alone to run households.  Currently, food supplies have become a major concern for 93% of the population. 72.7% of the country’s poorest households are headed by women, and 3 out of 7 families are severely food insecure. COVID-19 is only deepening this crisis (ENCOVI).

This webinar, the second organised by the emerging ASAP Venezuela chapter, will reflect on some of the most pressing consequences sitting behind these figures and the implications they hold for women in poverty.

We invite you to join us for this critical and lively discussion where three experts will talk about the following:

  • Deepening female poverty in Venezuela due to the complex humanitarian emergency

Adicea Castillo. Professor at the Central University of Venezuela

  • Female poverty and care economy

Rosa Paredes. Professor at the Central University of Venezuela

  • Gender and economy in the long term of asymmetric dependencies

Carmen Ibáñez. Researcher and lecturer at the Free University of Berlin

Register here

Filed Under: Announcements, Events

Webinar: Poverty in Venezuela in a Global Context

2020-08-06 By ASAP Global

Wednesday, August 26, 2020 – 11:00 (-4 GMT)

Venezuela’s institutional structures are facing a continuous deterioration that is leading the majority of the population into severe poverty, brought on by high levels of corruption. Yet, the problems Venezuela faces are not exclusive to this nation but are part of a wider, global problem. For instance, the country’s natural resources arouse attention from greedy foreign governments and corporations hoping to profit from Venezuela’s oil and other natural treasures but global institutions do not adequately control such interests. Poverty is also a source of unsafe, disorderly and irregular migration. This affects not only the people who move but also those they leave behind and the countries in the region where they arrive, which are likely to be suffering from significant levels of poverty themselves.

The causes and consequences of poverty exacerbation that Venezuela is experiencing are frequently presented and discussed but often using biased or incomplete information and assumptions not based on rigorous research. This webinar will discuss the pressing issues of poverty facing the country and consider their causal connections to global problems. It aims to explore where there are gaps in evidence and research focus, and how these can be addressed.

This webinar marks the emergence of a new ASAP Chapter and the event has been organised by a leading group of Venezuelan academics based at the University of the Andes (ULA, Venezuela), ULA Human Rights Observatory, Transparency Venezuela, University of Antioquia and Pontifical Bolivarian University.

We invite you to join us for this critical and lively discussion:

Wednesday, August 26, 2020 – 11:00 (-4 GMT)
Language: English 

Registration:  https://bit.ly/2X99bCQ

Filed Under: Announcements, Events

ASAP Conference 2020 – Coming 12-15th November

2020-08-01 By ASAP Global

“Build Back Better: Reducing Vulnerabilities, Strengthening Justice”

On the 12th – 15th November 2020 ASAP Global, ASAP Brazil, Quinnipiac Albert Schweitzer Institute and the Global Justice Program at Yale University will be jointly hosting this years Annual Justice Conference, which will be taking place online.

The aim of the Conference is to gather national and international specialists in order to extend the academic studies concerning the battle against poverty, misery and vulnerabilities. The Conference will concentrate its activities towards the following subjects:

  1. COVID-19 and its Unequal Impacts
  2. Environmental Crisis
  3. Historical Oppression, Colonialism, & Racism Today
  4. Social & Economic Vulnerabilities, Universal Safety Net & Basic Income, Right to Development & Sustainable Development Goals (UN).

Registration details coming soon but find out latest developments – here

Filed Under: Announcements, Events

Seventh Annual Amartya Sen Essay Prize 2020

2020-06-12 By ASAP Global

This year, Global Financial Integrity and Academics Stand Against Poverty will be awarding the seventh annual Amartya Sen Prizes to the two best original essays examining one particular component of illicit financial flows, the resulting harms and possible avenues of reform. Entered essays should be about 7,000 to 9,000 words long. There is a first prize of $5,000 and a second prize of $3,000.
Illicit financial flows are generally defined as cross-border movements of funds that are illegally earned, transferred, or used. Examples are funds earned through illegal trafficking in persons, drugs or weapons; funds illegally transferred through mispriced exchanges (e.g., among affiliates of a multinational corporation seeking to shift profits to reduce taxes); funds moved to evade taxes; and funds used for corruption of or by public or corporate officials. Illicit financial flows are explicitly recognized as an obstacle to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and singled out as a separate target #4 of SDG 16.
Components of illicit financial flows can be delimited by sector and geographically. Delimitation by sector might focus your essay on some specific activity, business or industry – such as art, real estate, health care, technology, entertainment, shipping, agriculture, sports, gaming, education, politics, tourism, natural resource extraction, banking and financial services – or on an even narrower subsector such as the diamond trade, hunting, insurance or prostitution. Delimitation by geography might further narrow the essay’s focus to some particular country, province or region.
Your essay should describe the problematic activity and evaluate the adverse effects of it that make it problematic. Also, in quantitative terms insofar as this is possible, you should estimate the magnitude of the relevant outflows as well as the damage they do to the institutions and to the affected populations. This might include harm from abuse, exploitation and impoverishment of individuals, harm through subdued economic activity and reduced prosperity, and/or harm through diminished tax revenues that depress public spending.
Your essay should also explain the persistence of the harmful activity in terms of relevant incentives and enabling conditions and, based on your explanation, propose plausible ways to curtail the problem. Such reform efforts might be proposed at diverse levels, including supranational rules, national rules, corporate policies, professional ethics, individual initiatives, or any combination thereof. The task is to identify who has the responsibility, the capacity and (potentially) the knowledge and motivation to change behavior toward effective curtailment.
We welcome authors from diverse academic disciplines and from outside the academy. Please send your entry by email attachment on or before 31 August 2020 to Tom Cardamone at SenPrize@gfintegrity.org. While your email should identify you, your essay should be stripped of self-identifying references, formatted for blind review.

Filed Under: Announcements

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Welcome to ASAP

Established in 2010, Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) is an international community of academics confronting the rules and practices that perpetuate global poverty. Our evidence-based approach provides:

• alternatives to conventional analysis by media and governmental organizations,
• proposals for reforming national and supranational rules and policies,
• public education encouraging citizens to understand and engage with critical issues.

Academics Stand Against Poverty is registered as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in the United States (EIN #32-0324998)

Our Board

Our board includes leading academics from a variety of fields, all with a passionate interest in poverty alleviation.
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Our Mission

We seek the elimination of global poverty, as guided by rigorous evidence-based and normative scholarship.
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We gladly accept all media inquiries, general inquiries, inquiries for national ASAP Chapters and other suggestions.
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