Emerging Poverty and Social Inclusion Challenges: From Evidence to Inclusive Operations
9 October 2026 (Friday)
This regional forum will take stock of the most pressing poverty and social inclusion challenges facing Asia and identify practical opportunities for addressing them. Drawing on country experiences from across the region, the discussion will explore how governments, in collaboration with ADB and other development partners, can strengthen policies and programs to reduce poverty, tackle inequalities, and advance social inclusion.
The event will be organised around three themes that represent key challenges and focus areas for addressing poverty and social inclusion across Asia and the Pacific:
- Poverty is multifaceted: The multidimensional nature of poverty is widely recognised, including in the SDGs. Nevertheless, income-based measures of poverty continue to dominate assessments of the problem and input into policy and programme design. In this theme, we will take stock of poverty trends in Asia from multiple perspectives, including monetary and multidimensional measures. In specific, we will consider how country-specific approaches to measuring multidimensional poverty, such as national Multidimensional Poverty Indices (MPIs), can offer operational input at national and programmatic levels to ensure a comprehensive response to poverty.
- Social exclusion and inequalities intersect: Social exclusion is rarely driven by a single form of disadvantage. Instead, inequalities intersect and compound across markers of disadvantage such as gender, age, disability, ethnicity, migration status and geography. Understanding these intersections is crucial for strengthening social inclusion in a meaningful and sustainable manner. In this theme, we will explore prevailing intersecting inequalities across Asia and promising approaches to tackle them while including the voices of lived experience experts.
- Moving out of poverty into precarity: Efforts to tackle poverty should not stop at addressing people's most severe deprivations or urgent needs. Lifting people out of poverty often means moving them into a state of precarity, where even relatively minor shocks can push them back into poverty. In this theme, we will explore the nature of precarity across the region and consider how policy and programmatic approaches can better respond to the poverty-precarity continuum and ensure a sustainable response to poverty.
Register to join the side event in-person.