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You are here: Home / Archives for Project: Impact: Global Poverty

Impact Interview: Martha Chen

2014-05-19 By ASAP Global

In this article, Gabriel Neely-Streit interviews Professor Martha Chen, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Read more of our Impact Interviews.

Martha Chen
Martha Chen

In 1997, Chen helped found, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), a “global research-policy network that seeks to improve the status of the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy.” The informal economy comprises around 300 million laborers worldwide who work without employment security, social security, or other state or employer benefits. Around 70% of informal workers are self-employed, and many live below the international poverty line.

Here, Prof. Chen discusses her organization’s multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary approach to supporting informal laborers, as well as her journey from a small NGO in former East Pakistan (Bangladesh) to Harvard’s Kennedy School, and leadership of one of the most important NGOs in informal sector development.

ASAP: You described your career as progressing, “from activist practitioner to activist academic”. Can you describe that progression? What motivated you to enter academia?

The activist practitioner part of my career, which was the first half of my career, began when my husband and I and our young son were living in Dhaka, East Pakistan in 1970. The coast of East Pakistan was hit by a very large cyclone and tidal wave, in November of 1970. At that time there were very few NGO’s in East Pakistan, unlike today. A group of us started a cyclone relief project and that got many of us into development. That was followed by activism around the recognition of Bangladesh and the civil war that was being perpetrated on East Pakistan by West Pakistan. Then, in the mid-70’s I joined what is now the world’s largest NGO but was at that time quite small: BRAC [then known as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee]. The founder of BRAC [Fazle Hasan Abed] and I had worked together on the cyclone relief and some of the money we had raised for cyclone relief he spent to rehabilitate refugees returning from India after the Civil War, and that’s how BRAC was born. He invited me to join BRAC, so I did and started the women’s program in BRAC. That was the beginning of my activist practitioner career.

I worked with BRAC for 5 years. The work involved organizing village women, but also supporting their livelihoods in various ways: craft revival, poultry farms; all the inputs that were needed to make their livelihoods more viable.

The next chapter of my activist practitioner career was that I was invited by Oxfam America to set up their first field office in India, and I did that in 1970-71. I was in India for going on 7 years. I took all the lessons I’d learned from BRAC Bangladesh and supported a portfolio of grantees who were working with either village women or city-slum dweller women around their economic empowerment. I worked with about 60 NGO’s.

ASAP: I’m imagining that work informed a lot of the work you’ve done with WIEGO

Yes, both those chapters of my activist practitioner life sort of propelled me into the WIEGO work. Any of the knowledge I’d gained, the contacts I made, the commitment I gained, all of that was then channeled into WIEGO.

ASAP: How did you come to form WIEGO?

When I left Oxfam America in India, I came to Harvard and I started doing research and teaching at the Kennedy School. For about a decade I tried to stay involved in the more activist practitioner part of my life. I did consulting, and I did field research.

In the early 1990’s, three of us [at the Kennedy School] began to say, ‘we need to do something about how the informal economy is perceived in mainstream academia, and in mainstream development discourse,’ because we knew that it was stigmatized as underground, illegal, black, gray, and that the working poor that we worked with were mostly in the informal economy, and most were simply trying to earn an honest living against actually great odds. So we began circling the idea of a project on the informal economy.

In 1997 we convened a group of 10 experts on the informal economy for what was called the team residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, in Bellagio, Italy. Some of us didn’t know each other before but we knew about each other so we gathered people who we thought were had the same concerns that the informal economy was misunderstood and somehow undervalued in development circles. We had four or five days at Bellagio to spell out how we saw the problem and what we thought would address it. We had a member of that founding group that loved to do charts for us. He did a chart that had a pyramid and an inverted pyramid. The pyramid was what the labor force looked like. At the tip of it you had the formal labor force, at the base of it you had the large informal workforce. On the inverted pyramid at the top you had all the resources and support (policies, regulations) supporting the small formal workforce, and at the inverted tip of the pyramid, you had the very few resources and support going towards the broad base of the informal economy. We wanted to make a rectangle instead of the inverted pyramid where appropriate; resources and support would go to the base of the informal workforce.

ASAP: What are some of the particular challenges that face female workers in the informal economy? How does WIEGO address those challenges?

We address them in a 2-layered way. One is that we see the problems that all informal workers face, and usually those are sector specific, and then we look at the particular constraints that women within those sectors might face that the men do not. There are 2 kinds of issues that we look for. One is what are the negatives, the sort of binding constraints on informal workers as a whole, and by sector. Then we look to see what kind of support they are demanding, either legal, policy, services, resources, what kind of support would help them. So it’s partly what would reduce the negatives and also what would enhance the positives for informal workers by sector.

Then we look at what’s affecting women in particular. So if you take street trade for instance, the big constraints are the insecurity of the vending site and the daily harassment by local authorities, specifically police. Within that, the problems are particularly acute for those who sell fresh produce, one of the reasons being that if your goods are confiscated and they’re fresh, they perish before you can retrieve them from the local authorities. We also know that the majority of fresh produce vendors are women and that the majority of vendors of more durable products are men. So that’s how we address the generic constraints and then the differences between men and women within them.

ASAP: Describe a few of WIEGO’s greatest achievements.

I’ll go from the more abstract to the more specific. I think with regards to mainstream thinking mindsets, we have changed the conceptualization of the informal economy to include not just the self-employed in informal enterprises but also the wage employed in what we call informal jobs. We’ve developed with the ILO (International Labor Organization) statistics department and other international and national statistical bodies a new concept and definition called informal employment, which includes both the self-employed and the wage employed. That is one of the main contributions at the more abstract, intellectual level.

More concretely, we have helped create or strengthen organizations of the workers and link them up by sector. We’ve helped create national, regional and international alliances of domestic workers, home based producers, street vendors and waste pickers. We know for sure that many of those organizations would not exist without our support or would not be as strong. Those are our two main claims to fame. Otherwise, we’ve been able to change mindsets and get more favorable policies in those contexts. But our two main achievements increasing visibility through the statistics and the second one is increasing voice through organization.

ASAP: You talk about the importance of inter-disciplinary cooperation in doing this kind of work. Why is that cooperation important, and how do you achieve it?

There is the academic context of interdisciplinary research, but the more important interdisciplinary aspect of WIEGO’s work is what I would call inter-constituency. We’re really a 3-legged stool. We have members and partners that are organizations of informal workers, we have members and partners that are researchers and statisticians, and then we have members and partners who are development practitioners in national government, international agencies, and NGO’s, and we bridge those three worlds. I think that’s a signature dimension of our work, that we really try to bridge those worlds and build on the comparative strengths of each to leverage more support for the working poor in the informal economy. We help build the advocacy capacity of the organizations of workers, we gain expertise from them, we get researchers and statisticians working on improving our knowledge of the informal economy and then we partner with development agency members and partners to try to bring about policy change.

ASAP: Do academics have a responsibility to be activists?

I wouldn’t say that all academics have a responsibility to be activists. I think that academics in the social sciences might be more likely to be engaged in the real world effecting some type of change in either policies, or theories or practices that relate to issues that impinge on the poor, so there’s a responsibility to make sure that what they do in the real world doesn’t have contradictory outcomes for the poor. Maybe one way to do that is to become more activist with what you do in the world. But I wouldn’t say that all the people in the humanities or the sciences have a responsibility to be activists.

ASAP: How has your activism work with WIEGO encouraged or inspired your academic research?

I was trained to learn and to think inductively rather than deductively: I don’t start with received wisdom and then try to test the theory, I tend to start with descriptive reality and then build up theory, so my exposure through activism is always feeding into that kind of inductive learning and thinking. There’s just no doubt that it has informed my academic work.

ASAP: What are your future goals?

I see myself for the duration of my career being both academic and activist, primarily through my WIEGO work. The research/intellectual agenda of that work is to continue to push for better statistics on the informal economy, since data drives so much of policy making and to complement that with better field research on the informal economy.

We’ve just completed the analysis of the first round of a 10-city study on what’s driving change in the urban informal economy. We plan, if we can raise the funds, to do a second round so we would have a longitudinal panel of data on observing the workers in those 10 cities.

ASAP: Does WIEGO present its findings to policy makers?

We don’t do research without having that in mind as our targeted outcome. We’ve presented the first round of findings at the World Urban Forum, I’m presenting to the European Commission, and a regional conference with urban officials in Bangkok next week. We wouldn’t do the research if it wasn’t going to be channeled. In each of the 10 cities our lead partner was a local organization of workers, so we have published advocacy tools and materials based on the city level studies for those organization to use in their ongoing advocacy work. It’s always research to advocacy. There’s no doubt about that. That’s the goal.

ASAP: What advice can you share with academics who might be interested in poverty related activism?

I think it’s very important to partner with some kind of member organization of the poor to first know what their needs, demands, and dreams are, and second to tailor your own research and activism to meet those needs and demands and dreams, and to build the capacity of those organizations to carry on the fight. Academics and policy makers will come and go but the poor and their organizations are the ones who are in it for the long haul, to try to make their working environment more favorable and supportive.

Filed Under: Impact Interviews Tagged With: Bangladesh, BRAC, India, Martha Chen, Oxfam, Project: Impact: Global Poverty, WIEGO

Prof. Jason Sharman on Pressuring Governments and Banks on Corruption

2014-03-04 By ASAP Global

Jason Sharman
Jason Sharman

By Gabriel Neely-Streit, Impact: Global Poverty Contributing Writer

This latest ASAP Impact Story profiles Prof. Jason Sharman of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, whose recent work has been instrumental in exposing widespread corruption among Papua New Guinea (PNG) government officials. Millions of dollars, Sharman has found, are being siphoned from PNG government accounts into private bank accounts and investments in Australia, many of which belong to government officials.

Sharman and Sam Koim, Papua New Guinea’s Anti-Corruption task-force coordinator, continue to work to expose both these corrupt PNG officials and actions by Australian banks and government agencies that allow money laundering to continue. More broadly, Sharman is one of the world’s foremost scholars on shell companies and international money laundering, issues with increasingly important implications for global poverty and governance in virtually all states. Here, he discusses his research on PNG corruption, Australian money laundering and international shell companies, and his efforts to bring his findings to a public audience.

GNS: How did you first get started studying corruption and the shadow economy? What motivated you to focus on money laundering?

JS: I first developed an interest in tax havens because in studying international politics I was interested in how small, weak countries (most tax havens are small places) relate to big, powerful ones. Tax havens led to an interest in money laundering as the two are commonly associated in policy pronouncements and the media, though the partial evidence we have actually suggests that most laundering takes place in big, rich countries.

How did you become aware of Papua New Guinea’s money laundering issues? How did you get involved with Sam Koim and Taskforce Sweep?

I was alerted to the problem of corruption proceeds from PNG being laundered in Australia by people who did the international assessment of PNG’s financial system. When I first did interviews with people in the Australian government they recommended I get in touch with Sam Koim, and so I flew him over to a workshop in Brisbane in October 2012, we have stayed in touch since.

How much of PNG budget siphoning/ money laundering is being done by government officials?

The local police estimates that something like 40% of the total PNG budget is stolen by politicians and bureaucrats in the government.

How do you go about gathering statistics on money laundering and other under-the-table financial practices? I know that to research corporate shell companies you had to actually create some yourself…

In a smaller project I bought some shell companies from Nevada, England the Seychelles as well as opening bank accounts in the US, Cyprus and Somalia. Later with my co-authors Mike Findley and Dan Nielson we impersonated a range of high- and low-risk individuals and made over 7,000 email solicitations to firms in 180 countries for exactly the sort of untraceable shell companies that are prohibited by international law. The results are available at globalshellgames.com.

In which ways are Australian banks complicit in PNG money laundering? Are they doing due diligence to ensure that customers with PNG ties are banking legitimate money? What should they be doing?

The Australian banks have improved their procedures for screening out corruption funds from PNG, though there are still problems. The real problem is the Australian government, which continues to turn a blind eye to these flows of dirty money.

Your work with PNG has gained a fair amount of media attention in Australia. How did you and your partner bring your findings to the media/ general public? Why did you feel it was important to do so?

Crime is a media-worthy story. When it comes to corruption, the Australian government has no interest in taking action unless they are embarrassed in the media first. After taking no action for years there was a public direction to the head of the Australian Federal Police to look into the problem less than 24 hours after the main TV program aired. Cause and effect.

In what sorts of ways does presenting your findings to the media differ from presenting in an academic journal/at a conference?

Predictably, the media has no interest in method and theory, so all this had to go. The media does have an interest in hurting people and institutions, which can be turned to advantage, e.g. in pressuring the government.

Did you have to take precautions against any sort of backlash by the PNG government, for example being sued by officials who were implicated? Did you feel threatened at any point during your research/presentation of your findings? What has the fallout been?

The Australian government has now cut off my access to some key officials, which is annoying, and tried to prevent people in the PNG government talking to me, unsuccessfully. Getting sued for libel/defamation is certainly a worry, I’ve taken precautions but the risk remains. People in PNG tackling this problem certainly face much bigger dangers, including assassination.

What’s next for the PNG case? Has Koim made any prosecutions? Have Australian banks/government institutions stepped up their vigilance?

Koim has made good progress is getting a lot of publicity, political pressure, arrests and has also got a lot of money back, but the problem is huge. He is also in a great deal of danger personally.

How important is stopping these corrupt financial outflows to PNG’s stability? How serious are PNG’s financial and humanitarian issues?

Having 40% of your budget stolen is a serious problem, PNG seems to be a classic case of the resource curse, with great wealth but also very large sections of the population living in poverty. Elsewhere this type of problem has led to serial political instability and even state collapse.

What advice do you have for academics who want to take a more active role in fighting corruption?

Don’t expect any help from local or foreign governments, though individual officials are often incredibly helpful, and NGOs and the media are also crucial.

Filed Under: Impact Interviews Tagged With: II, Jason Sharman, Papua New Guinea, Project: Impact: Global Poverty, Theme: Institutional Reform

Impact: Global Poverty PowerPoint Presentations Now Available

2013-10-27 By ASAP Global

As a part of ASAP’s Impact: Global Poverty initiative, leaders of poverty and global justice research centers around the world gathered at Yale October 18-20, 2013 for the ASAP-sponsored conference, Human Rights & Economic Justice: Essential Elements of the Post-MDG Agenda. Each of them was asked to give a short presentation on how they have pursued positive impact on poverty alleviation policy and practice, very broadly construed. The PowerPoint and Prezi presentations they prepared for this purpose are below.

Lessons from Campaigns of Civil Resistance for the Battle Against Illicit Financial Flows: Adding Citizens to the Global Financial Integrity Equation by Peter Ackerman, Founding Chair of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict and Shaazka Beyerle, Senior Advisor to the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict

Access to Medicines: Barriers Relating to Intellectual Property Rights and Data Exclusivity by Julian Cockbain, Consultant European patent attorney, and Sigrid Sterckx, Professor of Ethics at Ghent University

Contesting the Frame: Engaging with South Africa’s Anti-Poverty Consensus by Andries du Toit, Director of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape

Putting Universalism to the Service of Global Justice: Can Two-Tiered Social Services Be Avoided? by Juliana Martínez Franzoni, Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Costa Rica

Impact at Just World Institute by Tim Hayward, Director of the Just World Institute at the University of Edinburgh

Could the Post-2015 Development Agenda Promote Poverty Eradication as an International Social Norm?  by David Hulme, Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester

Perspectives on Illicit Financial Flows Post-2015: Intergovernmental Organization Perspectives by Gail Hurley, Policy Specialist in Development Finance at the UNDP

Child Poverty and Equity: Concepts, Methods, and Action by Alberto Minujin, Executive Director of Equity for Children at the New School

Academia and Action by Jonathan Morduch, Managing Director of the Financial Access Initiative at New York University

Illicit Financial Flows, Poverty, and Human Rights by Thomas Pogge, Director of the Global Justice Program at Yale University

Piloting the Health Impact Fund by Thomas Pogge, Director of the Global Justice Program at Yale University

Successfully Promoting Justice: Closing Address by Thomas Pogge, Director of the Global Justice Program at Yale University

Towards a Global Governance System for Infectious Diseases by Harvey Rubin, Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

MDGs, Poverty, and Malnutrition: The Role of Social Inclusion by Nidhi Sadana Sabharwal, Director of the Indian Institute for Dalit Studies

Impact at the Hague Institute for Global Justice by Jill Coster van Voorhout, Researcher at The Hague Institute for Global Justice

Impact at Birmingham’s Center for the Study of Global Ethics by Heather Widdows, Director of the Center for the Study of Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham

Filed Under: Events Tagged With: Project: Impact: Global Poverty, Yale University

Academic Impact & Global Health Innovations Showcased at Yale

2013-10-22 By ASAP Global

Global health and academic impact on poverty were the discussed during the second day of Human Rights & Economic Justice: Essential Elements of the Post-MDG Agenda at Yale this Saturday. A global health panel showcased innovative proposals to improve access to healthcare, ranging from proposed reforms to the World Health Organization to a new method for powering vaccine refrigerators. The academic impact-focused panels featured the heads of poverty and global justice research centers around the world and their efforts to influence poverty-alleviation policy and development practice.

Kaveh Khoshnood, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Yale University, chaired the first session, which featured Julian Cockbain, a Ghent-based patent attorney; Steven Hoffman, Assistant Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University; Thomas Pogge, President of ASAP; Harvey Rubin, professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania; and Sigrid Sterckx, Professor of Bioethics at Ghent University.

Pogge presented the Health Impact Fund (HIF) as a way to extend access to new medicines to people around the world, regardless of their ability to pay, and announced that in the coming year there would be a pilot of the HIF in India, focusing on multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. Rubin shared his Energize the Chain (EtC) initiative, which will provide vaccine refrigerators in remote areas using electricity from cell phone towers. Rubin told his audience that more than 2 million people die from vaccine-preventable disease each year, in part because of breaks in the “cold chain” of vaccine refrigerators. In areas where electricity for refrigeration is unavailable, vaccines breakdown and become unusable. He argued that the prevalence of cell phone towers throughout the developing world makes the EtC proposal the best available solution to this problem.

ASAP Board Member Luis Cabrera led the “impact” sessions of the conference, which spanned Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. These sessions were  inspired by his Impact: Global Poverty initiative and featured academics who have worked to make an impact on poverty and global justice. To date, Impact: Global Poverty has been a tool to share widely the stories of academics who’ve led successful poverty alleviation efforts, and Cabrera said that he hoped the conference would illuminate new ways in which ASAP could support impact work by academics.

Martha Chen, Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, spoke about the work of Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), of which she is International Coordinator. In her talk, she argued that there is a strong link between informal employment and poverty and that widespread informal employment is generated by unjust structures in the global production system and urban politics in developing countries. WIEGO has led many successful advocacy campaigns to improve the lives of women working in the informal economy.

Mitu Sengupta, ASAP Board Member and President of ASAP Canada, chaired the first Impact: Global Poverty panel, which focused on impact and the Global South. Teddy Cruz, Co-Director of the Blum Center for Cross-Border Poverty Research and Practice at the University of California-San Diego described public art and urban design projects he had led in an effort to promote social connections and learning across cultural and income differences. Nidhi Sadana Sabharwal, Executive Director of the Indian Insitute for Dalit Studies, described research on the impacts of social exclusion and discrimination in India and the policy agenda that has emerged from that work. Andries du Toit, Director of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape, spoke on the opportunities and challenges presented by the “pro-poor consensus” in South African politics. Juliana Martinez Franzoni, Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Costa Rica, spoke on the merits of universalist social policies as an alternative to narrow anti-poverty programs. According Professor Martinez: “universalism must confront segmentation and marketization” in order to build the cross-class solidarity necessary for achieving social justice.

Amy Gordon, Researcher and Sessional Lecturer in Philosophy at Dominican University College, chaired the panel Impact in Comparative Perspective, which featured Jonathan Morduch, Managing Director of the Financial Access Initiative at New York University; Alberto Minujin, Executive Director of Equity for Children at the New School; and Alberto Cimadamore, Scientific Director of the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP). Morduch spoke on the dilemmas he’s faced as an academic pursuing poverty impact, especially as his research has focused on microfinance. He told the audience he’d chosen to act as a constructive critic of microfinance, rather than a cheerleader, but that this choice involved significant traeoffs. Minujin described the challenges of defining and measuring poverty and equity for the policy advocacy efforts of Equity for Children. Finally, Cimadamore outlined CROP’s advocacy on the MDG successors and the challenges of influencing public discourse around poverty.

The day concluded with keynotes by Sukhadeo Thorat, Chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, and David Hulme, Executive Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester. Thorat focused on the importance of research for understanding the needs of the different groups living in poverty around the world and of fighting discrimination. During his speech, Hulme gave a critical assessment of the MDGs, saying they had made a “small net contribution but [were] NOT transformational” and that the UN-led process of identifying goals to succeed the MDGs had failed to reshape public attitudes and mobilize the grassroots. However, he expressed optimism about the potential of the post-MDG framework to encompass more of the commitments necessary to end poverty.

You can read about presentations made during the first day of the conference here.

You can also download the conference agenda and program.

Filed Under: Events Tagged With: Project: Health Impact Fund, Project: Impact: Global Poverty, Theme: Global Health, Yale University

“Lighting Many Fires” With ASAP

2012-07-15 By ASAP Global

The following are Professor Thomas Pogge’s closing comments at the “Impact: Global Poverty” meeting to launch ASAP in the UK and Ireland, held at the University of Birmingham on May 23, 2011. Here, Professor Pogge outlines some of the primary aims of ASAP globally, and some of the ways in which academics might leverage their unique expertise in efforts to address global poverty.

Start with the thought that the central purpose of ASAP is to reduce poverty. Upstream from this purpose we must ask: what is poverty, what are we to measure our work against? Here, it is important to communicate with poor people themselves. Poor people may not make a strong distinction between poverty and other vulnerabilities; they may see lack of resources as intimately intertwined with vulnerability to violence, for example, and with indignities suffered from officials. Maybe we should then also see their problem in broader terms. This upstream work of specifying what the fight is about takes on special importance, because in the next two years the new international anti-poverty agenda will be decided upon. What’s going to come after the MDGs? We should work to educate and try to steer that agenda a little bit. We should be heavily present in the coming debates.

Downstream from our central purpose we must ask how the cluster of deprivations we identify can be addressed effectively by academics. How can we best help reduce these deprivations? Here we should remember that there are certain things academics are good at and others they are not so good at; and also that there’s a lot of stuff already out there. So, rather than ask blandly “what is to be done?”, we should ask more specifically: “how can we add ourselves to an already existing poverty infrastructure in order to make this infrastructure most effective?” Perhaps one important contribution we can make is coordination. Anti-poverty efforts as they are now are certainly not well coordinated. As academics, we can collaborate across disciplines and also coordinate beyond the academy, making use of an extensive network of academic institutions that already reaches into pretty much all areas of the world. Through this academic network, we can establish collaborations with civil society in many countries and collaborate with their NGO communities. We might become something like an umbrella organization that would better coordinate the efforts of different types of groups within and across different countries, including here all groups that are seriously focused on poverty reduction, regardless of any specific religion, ideology or political affiliation they may have.

I started pessimistically this morning by saying that we’ve failed to make much of an impact in the last 30 years or so. We have not been able to protect the world’s poor from a massive shift against them in the distribution of global household income. There are various reasons for this. One of them is an excess of “good ideas”. Look at the World Social Forum, where 30,000 people have 30,000 good ideas – which are bound to drown out one another. What we need is more unity: the ability to coordinate on one really good and strategically important idea and then to join forces to push it through. And so perhaps we should think of ASAP as something between a loose network and a tight organization moving in lock-step, something like a platform that mobilizes and coordinates the efforts of academics, unifying us behind a very small number of important reform ideas that we can actually achieve with the help of organizations outside academia. Then we can be, I think, massively effective: we can light fires in many countries, and can become an important voice that keeps governments focused on the poverty problem and prevents a repeat of the scandalous dilution of government promises that we witnessed around the millennium.

Filed Under: Impact Interviews Tagged With: Chapter: UK, Project: Impact: Global Poverty, Thomas Pogge

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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:

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