Dr Francesco Burchi, Senior Researcher at IDOS, was invited to participate in the Inter-Agency Expert Group Meeting, organised by the Division for Inclusive Social Development of UNDESA, in collaboration with the Gender, Poverty and Social Policy Division (GPSPD) of the Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
The event took place in Addis Ababa, 10-12 May 2023, and brought together poverty experts from different organisations, research centres, universities and think thanks. The objective was to discuss recent and historical poverty trajectories in different parts of the world, identify the key policies that were successful in reducing poverty, and finally envisage the role that the United Nations system could play to accelerate global actions for a world without poverty.
Dr Burchi participated virtually and gave a presentation on “Global trends in multidimensional poverty and horizontal inequalities in poverty” and wrote a background paper on the same topic together with Dr Daniele Malerba. This work, which builds on recent studies within the IDOS project on Measuring and assessing multidimensional poverty across the world, shows that there has been a general progress in multidimensional poverty reduction, but this has been substantially lower than the progress in income poverty reduction and uneven across world regions. Moreover, women and rural areas are substantially disadvantaged. The inputs were very well taken, as confirmed by the inclusion of several points in the final meeting report drawn up by UNECA and UNDESA, containing the main findings to be sent to the UN Secretary-General.