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 rightswithin 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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
10:00 am VET (9:00 am Colombia and 14:00 GMT) Language: Spanish
The world produces enough food so that every person on the planet can be fed. Prof. Alejandro Gutiérrez (El Universal, 2020) reminds us though, that due to unequal income distribution, there are many millions who do not have access to sufficient levels of food to sustain themselves or maintain good levels of health. Increasing awareness around the food poverty problem has led to it becoming a central element of policies aimed at achieving food security. In Latin America, for food security to be realized it will require sustained economic growth over time as the links between growth and reduce poverty as well known. Increasing economic levels alone are not, however, enough. Food security will also require the reduction of all forms of inequality. Especially those related to the distribution of income if we are to ensure that the most vulnerable and impoverished are to benefit from growth (Gutiérrez, 2020).
In this third webinar in the series organized by the emerging chapter of ASAP Venezuela, Prof. Alejandro Gutiérrez and Dr. Diego Zambrano will talk about the relationship between food security and poverty, centering on Latin America and the current severe food crisis in Venezuela.
We invite you to join us for this critical and lively discussion.
Speakers:
VENEZUELA: CRISIS, POVERTY AND FOOD SECURITY
Prof. Alejandro Gutiérrez. University of Los Andes, Venezuela
POVERTY IN VENEZUELA AND LATIN AMERICA
Dr. Diego Zambrano. Florida International University, USA
ASAP\’s global health project seeks to blueprint a Health Impact Fund that, jointly supported by many countries, would invite innovators to register any new pharmaceutical for participation in ten consecutive annual payouts, each to be divided among registered products according to health gains achieved in the preceding year. With these reward payments enabling innovators to recoup their R&D expenses and to make competitive profits, the price of registered products is capped to merely covering their lowest feasible costs of manufacture and distribution.
Three main reasons for creating such a fund are forcefully illustrated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: the Health Impact Fund would end neglect of the – most communicable – diseases of poverty, and greatly enhance knowledge about them, rendering our pharmaceutical industry much better prepared to confront emerging threats. It would encourage pharmaceutical innovator efforts to attack diseases at the population level, paying most for full eradication (while, under the current monopoly patent regime, disease eradication would choke off the innovator\’s earnings). Finally, the Health Impact Fund would also end the exclusion of poor people worldwide from advanced pharmaceuticals by providing at-cost access to them while also strongly encouraging competent delivery even to remote and impoverished locations.
To learn more about this innovative initiative and how it is working to delink the price of drugs from the cost of research, join the HIF team as they explore and discuss the approach. Sign up – here
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
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?
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.
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
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
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:
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.
