Time and Date: 22 February 2016 5.15 pm
Venue: SOAS Main Building, Russell Square, 4th Floor
Speaker: Professor Dan Brockington, Director of the Sheffield Institute for International Development which “promotes a vision of international development as a struggle for social justice and a space for activism and engagement”. Before that he was Professor of Conservation and Development at the University of Manchester. Most of his research has been in rural Tanzania.
Many measures of poverty suggest that recent economic growth has benefitted a fortunate few, but not many of the worst off, particularly in rural areas. Professor Brockington will present a different picture. His work, based on revisiting households first visited in the early 1990s, suggests that many of the poorest households are now much better off than they were. It does not, however, follow that these improvements are due to GDP growth. If so this has important implications for agricultural and anti-poverty policies in rural areas.