Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) is a global organization focused on utilizing scholarship to influence policy and public attitudes to poverty.

ASAP’s overarching aim is to contribute to the eradication of severe poverty worldwide, by ensuring that poverty policy and development efforts are guided by rigorous empirical and normative scholarship. Our principal focus is on poor people in less affluent countries, because that is where poverty tends to be the most concentrated and severe, and where resources for tackling it tend to be scarcer. However, our ultimate concern is for people, not for countries, and so we are also concerned with poor people in affluent countries.

ASAP recognizes that poverty is a process, not a static given. Our members explore a wide range of factors in their analyses of poverty, and promote a variety of solutions. With such diversity in mind, ASAP does not offer a narrow poverty analysis, but seeks to promote robust dialogue informed by substantial research from all regions of the world.

Finally, ASAP’s theory of social change focuses on both institutions and norms. Thus, we seek both to promote sound and progressive poverty policy at the domestic and global levels, and to help change norms around the acceptability of severe poverty. Inspired by how engaged academics helped transform views on civil rights, the US war in Vietnam, apartheid and lately gender inequality and violence, ASAP holds that we can help achieve a decisive shift of views on poverty and poor people worldwide.

The ASAP United Kingdom chapter was formally launched in December 2012, with the appointment as co-chairs of Cat Tully and Meera Tiwari. Tully is the Director of international consulting firm From Over Here, and former Strategy Project Director of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Dr. Meera Tiwari is Head of Global Studies and Reader in International Development at the University of East London.

ASAP UK builds on the work of ASAP international developing debate and dialogue around the multidimensional issue of poverty and its many causes. ASAP UK is unique in its ability to combine academic excellence with policy influence, with policy makers, civil service representatives and academics cross collaborating on projects to raise greater awareness, increase momentum and impact real change. Our events are attended by influential academics, policy makers and industry professionals. We aim to use this expertise to generate political action and impact, to enhance our academic research and to inform policy decisions. It is through our interdisciplinary nature that we can achieve realistic and effective results in reducing poverty.