This page lists news items relating to current and upcoming events. We also maintain a separate archive of past ASAP events, as a part of our online resources.
Academics Stand Against Poverty
This page lists news items relating to current and upcoming events. We also maintain a separate archive of past ASAP events, as a part of our online resources.
By ASAP Global
takes place 11-14 November on ZOOM https://yale.zoom.us/j/3713192937
It features a session with the winners of the Eighth Annual Amartya Sen Essay Prize Competition.
Apart from this, much of this year’s event is devoted to exploring incentives and rewards for creating and delivering innovations. Globalized in 1995 through the TRIPs Agreement, humanity’s dominant mechanism for encouraging innovations involves 20-year product patents, whose monopoly features enable innovators to reap markups or licensing fees from early users. This mechanism leads innovators to ignore the needs specific to poor people, who cannot afford to pay large markups; and it also tends to exclude the poor from marketed innovations that are still under patent. In addition, monopoly patents are insufficiently sensitive to externalities — they under-reward, for example, benefits enjoyed by parties other than an innovation’s buyers and users, resulting in massive underinvestment in R&D of green technologies.
Arguably, these problems can be much alleviated by adding a second reward option. This might be a class of domain-specific supplementary alternative mechanisms featuring fixed annual reward pools to be divided among participating innovations according to the social impact achieved with each. Innovations registered for such impact rewards would have to be sold at or below variable cost. An international Health Impact Fund in the pharmaceutical sector, for instance, would create powerful new incentives to develop remedies against diseases concentrated among the poor, rapidly to provide such remedies with ample care at very low prices, and to deploy them strategically to contain, suppress, and ideally to eradicate the target disease. Analogously, a Green Impact Fund for Technology would create powerful new incentives to develop, and to supply at highly competitive prices, new technologies that avert and reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. By promoting innovations and their diffusion together, impact funds might greatly enlarge the benefits of innovation, especially to the poor, and thereby also its cost-effectiveness.
Brief Program:
11/11 at 9:45-10:00 Introduction to the Conference
11/11 at 10:00-11:00 Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia U Center for Sustainable Development)
11/11 at 11:11-12:50 Panel on human rights and intellectual property rights, Diane Desierto (Notre Dame) with Jorge Contreras (U of Utah College of Law), Lawrence Gostin (Georgetown U Law Center) and Ruth Okediji (Harvard Law School).
11/12 at 9:45-10:50 Awarding of the Amartya Sen Essay Prizes, Tom Cardamone (Global Financial Integrity) with Chia-Yun Po (First Prize; “Myanmar’s Jade: The Intersection of Illicit Financial Flows and Armed Conflicts”), Christopher Ngosa (joint Second Prize; “The gendered impacts of illicit financial flows in developing countries”) and Oluebube Offor (joint Second Prize; “Tales of Terrorism Financing in Nigeria: A Panoramic Account of its Root Causes, Consequential Impacts and Possible Reforms”).
11/12 at 11:00-12:30 Panel on the economics of innovation incentives, Aidan Hollis (U of Calgary) with Panos Kanavos (London School of Economics), Margaret Kyle (MINES ParisTech Center for Industrial Economics) and David Popp (Syracuse U).
11/13 at 9:00-10:50 Panel on Indian perspectives on innovation incentives, Sachin Chaturvedi (RIS) with Bhaskar Balakrishnan (RIS), Chandra Bhushan (iFOREST), Sudip Chauduri (CDS), Ashok Madan (IDMA), Leena Menghaney (MSF-India), Yogesh Pai (NLUD-Delhi), R.R. Rashmi (TERI).
11/13 at 11:00-12:50 Panel on African perspectives on green innovation, Bryan P. Galligan (Jesuit Justice and Ecology Network Africa) with Eugene Kabilika (Caritas Zambia), Dennis Kyalo (JENA & Aspen Institute), Emmanuel Nyadzi (Wageningen U) and Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood (U of Saint Andrews).
11/14 at 10:00-11:20
11/14 at 11:30-13:00 Panel on business and finance perspectives on pharmaceutical innovation, Jami Taylor (Protagonist Therapeutics) with Geoff Davis (Sorenson Impact), Nadza Durakovic (Blue Mark), Alice Lin Fabiano (Johnson & Johnson), Aina Fadina (Atento Capital), Gabrielle Gay (Kensington-SV Global), Pradeep Kakkatil (UN Health Innovation Exchange), Joanne Manrique (Center for Global Health and Development), Oliver Niedermaier (Tau Asset Management), Gerhard Pries (Sarona Asset Management) and Chuck Slaughter (TPG Rise).
11/14 at 13:30-14:00 Wrap-up.
By ASAP Global
ASAP is co-organizing a roundtable on Thursday 20th May on the Health Impact Fund: How the pharmaceutical sector can satisfy the needs of the global population:
Fondo de Impacto en la salud. Cómo hacer que el sector farmacéutico satisfaga las necesidades de toda la población
https://www.flacso.org.ar/mesa-redonda-fondo-de-impacto-en-la-salud/
By ASAP Global
Promoting Resilience, Reducing Vulnerabilities, Strengthening Social Justice 27th – 29th April 2021
ASAP East and Southern Africa (ASAP-ESA) in Conjunction with the Office of the Vice-President in Zambia will be jointly hosting the inaugural Social Justice Conference. The Conference will gather national and international specialists, both academics and policy experts, in order to extend the academics studies concerning the battle against poverty, misery and vulnerabilities in Zambia.
The Conference aims to strengthen the discourse on recovery in a changing world, with a focus on the growing demand for strengthening recovery systems ex-ante, promoting interventions and practices leading to resilient recovery, and enhancing the global knowledge resources on recovery. The conference will also build capacity for disaster risk reduction in recovery and reconstruction, including discussion and training on tools and methodologies. The Conference will bring together, academics, NGOs and the private sector to share their best practices and lessons on recovery and explore the nexus between resilient recovery efforts and sustainable poverty reduction.
The overall goal of the Conference will be to identify effective and forward looking approaches to achieve resilient post-crisis recovery in which justice, climate and disaster risk reduction, fragility and conflict considerations are mainstreamed.
The conference has the following specific objectives:
By ASAP Global
Three upcoming webinars from ASAP UK
This January, Academics Stand Against Poverty UK (“ASAP”) is running a mini-series of events addressing poverty after the pandemic. Join the ASAP UK team for some evenings of lively discussion and debate around some of the biggest issues emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Webinar 1. Addressing Poverty After The Pandemic: Human Rights
The first in the series will explore how the pandemic and the resulting lockdowns have once again highlighted the fragility of human rights within the UK and across the globe. Restrictions on travel, contact with family and friends, and increasing economic and health inequality means it is essential that a proactive approach is taken now to implement systematic and lasting change for a fairer and more equal UK in 2021 and the future.
When: Tuesday 19th January (18:00 – 19.30 GMT)
Where: book your place here through eventbrite.
Webinar 2. Addressing Poverty After The Pandemic: Environment
Many of us have seen our relationship with the environment change over the last 12 months. Lockdowns and travel restrictions leading to people spending far more time in their homes and local spaces. But what does this mean for those of us with no access to green space or living in degraded or polluted environments?
When: Wednesday 20th January (18:00 – 19.30 GMT)
Where: book your place here through eventbrite.
Webinar 3. Addressing Poverty After The Pandemic: Challenges and Solutions
Over the last 12 months we have seen a radical change in income and job security in the UK. Not only have we been encouraged to rethink who are “key workers” but many citizens have had to live on 80% income and unable to work for extended periods of time. Labour market disruption, job insecurity and economic recession may be the post pandemic context in which we have to address poverty.
When: Thursday 21st January (18:00 – 19:30)
Where: book your place here through eventbrite
By ASAP Global
Friday, October 16, 13:00 pm (BST)
To mark International Day for the Eradication of Poverty 2020 (Saturday 17th October) ASAP Irish Network, in partnership with the Civil Society Study Group of DSA Ireland, are hosting an event that will bring together an esteemed panel of development practitioners and scholars to explore linkages between health, food and poverty using evidence-based research, and possible strategies to eradicate such poverty. Speakers include:
Paul Ginnell & Alice Kelly
Director; Member @European Anti-Poverty Network (EAPN) Ireland; Glenshane Women’s Group
Paul works on EAPN Europe’s policy group and coordinates the Community Platform, a network of 30 national anti-poverty and equality organisations, and the Better Europe Alliance. Alice worked on EAPN Ireland Giving Health Inequalities a Voice community conversations in Fettercairn and is an Irish delegate to EU Meetings of People Experiencing Poverty in Brussels.
Julie Ahern
Legal and Policy manager @Childrens’ Rights Alliance, Ireland
Julie is a qualified barrister and holds a BL from the Honourable Society of King’s Inns, a BCL (Clinical)(Hons) and an LLM in Child and Family Law both from University College Cork. She has led the establishment of the Access to Justice Initiative and projects such as the annual Report Card and the Children’s Report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Thomas Pogge
Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs @Yale University
Director of the Global Justice Program at Yale, and a co-founder of Incentives for Global Health. Prof Pogge will focus on the Health Impact Fund proposal and how it would support innovations and their diffusion in a more equitable manner than the present system of patent monopolies does.
We invite you to join us for this critical and lively discussion. Register here