Darlington Mushongera at the 2015 HDCA Conference
GCRO researcher Darlington Mushongera presented a paper at the 2015 Annual Human Development Capabilities Conference in Washington DC at Georgetown University from 10 to 13 September 2015. The theme of the conference was 'Capabilities on the Move: Mobility and Aspirations'. The conference was addressed by leading researchers in the area of human development including Harvard Professor Amartya Sen, who pioneered the 'capabilities approach'.
Over the last decade Amartya Sen’s capability approach has emerged as the leading alternative to standard economic frameworks for thinking about poverty, inequality and human development generally. Other leading researchers present included Sabina Akire and James Foster who together developed the methodology for measuring multidimensional poverty currently in use across the world.
Darlington presented in a session titled 'Operationalising Multidimensional Measurement’, convened by Paula Balon, a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). Darlington's paper, 'Beyond GDP in assessing development in Africa: the case of the GCRO Barometer' presents the GCRO Barometer (www.gcro.ac.za/barometer) as an innovating tool for measuring development in a holistic manner. The paper centred on the need for researchers to move beyond GDP as the only measure development. The abstract of the paper is as follows:
'Consensus has grown across the world that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of development is inadequate, inappropriate and misleading. There is a pressing need to move beyond GDP and begin measuring progress on the basis of other indicators of human wellbeing. Several indexes have emerged in response to this need such as that of Human Development, Quality of Life, Sustainability, Governance and Genuine Progress Indexes among others. However, such indexes present similar challenges in that a single number is used to represent status hence obscuring individual changes in the component indicators as well as other areas of development. This paper proposes an innovative graphic tool for measuring development progress using multiple indicators in a way that circumvent this problem. This tool allows policy makers to view change across focus areas and across time simultaneously without losing specific detail about the direction of change in individual indicators.'
See more on the conference and the HDCA here https://hd-ca.org/conferences/. You can download the conference programme here https://hd-ca.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/HDCA-2015-Program.pdf.
