Winnie Byanyima launches our new institute

19 February 2016

The Global Development Institute officially launched on February 17 with a key note speech on inequality, delivered by Oxfam Executive Director Winnie Byanyima.

Byanyima, a Manchester Alumna, talked about Oxfam’s latest inequality report which found that extreme polarisation – the ownership of global assets by a tiny minority of the world’s population – has increased.

At the event, Byanyima issued a rallying cry for 'rebel academics' to come up with solutions to tackle power imbalances that were keeping people locked in poverty.

“Our broken economic system works for the few at the expense of the many.”

Nobel Prize Winner, and Professor of Economics Joseph Stiglitz joined the event by video, to call on Manchester to address inequality; “the biggest challenge of our times.”

Videos

You can watch videos from the launch event below:

Oxfam report

Now, only the 62 richest people in the world own the same value of assets as the 3.6 billion people in the bottom half of global incomes. This surpasses Oxfam’s original prediction that by 2016, the wealth of the top 1% will equal the wealth of the remaining 99%.

Find out more about the Oxfam inequality report:

Rising inequality

Professor David Hulme, Executive Director of the Global Development Institute, recently argued that it was time for something to be done on a global scale to tackle rising inequality.

“This can’t be the world anyone wants; from the richest of the rich, to the poorest of the poor, we should not be leaving future generations with rising inequality.”

Read Professor Hulme’s arguments on the GDI blog:

GDI PhD student, Chris Lyon, has also written a blog about 'optimistic rebels vs. the anti-politics machine:

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