OPHI aims to build and advance a more systematic methodological and economic framework for reducing multidimensional poverty, grounded in people's experiences and values.

OPHI's team members are involved in a wide range of activities and collaborations around the world, including survey design and testing, quantitative and qualitative data collection, training and mentoring, and advising policy makers.

OPHI has ongoing collaboration with teams around the world to test and improve the modules and to produce new data and qualitative and quantitative analyses on the missing dimensions.

Yet poor people themselves define their poverty much more broadly, to include lack of education, health, housing, empowerment, humiliation, employment, personal security and more.

Common purposes include national poverty measures that reflect changes over time, targeting of services or conditional cash transfers and monitoring and evaluation.

It includes identifying 'who is poor' by considering the range of deprivations they suffer, and aggregating that information to reflect societal poverty in a way that is robust and decomposable.

Contemporary methods of measuring poverty and wellbeing commonly generate a statistic for the percentage of the population who are poor, a head count (H).

The Alkire Foster Method generates a headcount and also a unique class of poverty measures (Mα): M0: An 'adjusted head count'.

The Alkire Foster method is a single societal poverty measure, but it can be broken down and analysed in a powerful way to inform policy.