As part of its support activities towards the fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goals, the Inter-American Development Bank together with the Instituto de Pesquisa Economica Aplicada (IPEA) of the Brazilian Government and the United Kingdom' Department for International Development (DFID) co-sponsored the International Conference “The Many Dimensions of Poverty” organized by the International Poverty Centre of the United Nations Development Programme. The event took place in Brasilia on August 29-31.
“For the IDB poverty issues are not only very important but strategic as well” said Carlos Eduardo Vélez Echavarria, Chief of the Poverty and Inequality Unit of the IDB during his presentation. “In fact, poverty reduction is one of our two strategic mandates and our presence here is because of the IDB commitment to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and our new sector strategies takes fully into account the multidimensional poverty perspective of the MDGs,” highlighted Vélez
The three days event included more than 10 sequential sessions discussing, among other topics were: the relevant dimensions of poverty, the various measurement perspectives of a multidimensional approach to poverty, the different ways of quantifying multidimensional poverty, the empirical case studies of multidimensional poverty, the policy implications of a multidimensional poverty analysis, and the relevance of a multidimensional approach to poverty in national consensus building. The conference gathered more than 50 well-known specialists in poverty and inequality across most disciplines as well as policy practitioners and development stakeholders to discuss analytical, theoretical, and empirical issues.