Between 2000 and 2015, extreme poverty was reduced in half. At the same time, inequalities have increased throughout the world, weakening the political, social and economic balances of the most concerned countries.
How can we explain this situation? Have development projects helped to reduce, stabilize or increase inequalities? What should donors do in order to take effective action to fight inequalities? How do such processes influence social cohesion?
For AFD, the reduction of inequality is closely linked to the poverty reduction and to the development model implemented by the partner countries. And in order to achieve so, AFD has decided to make social cohesion one of its strategic goals, for understanding it as the basis of the reduction of extreme inequality.
THE CONFERENCE
The “Inequalities and Social Cohesion” conference will have as ambition to bring together practitioners and researchers around these issues, and take this debate to the civil society.
The conference will take place in Paris over two days.
The first one, Thursday, December 6th, will be a scientific day with parallel sessions, at AFD.
The second one, December 7th, will be dedicated to high-level plenary debates open to a wide public and it will be held at the Institut du Monde Arabe. On this day, international experts, academics and policy makers will address the following issues:
- What model(s) of development/society would allow us to reduce inequality and promote social cohesion ?
- How does the emergence of middle classes impact inequality and social cohesion ?
- What is the influence of perceived inequality on social cohesion ?
- How to finance the fight against inequality ?
Besides the great quality of the presentations and debates, this conference will enable participants to establish lasting partnerships on the theme of inequality. Its originality lies in the dialogue between practitioners and researchers from a variety of disciplines around the universal subject that the inequalities represent.
For the academic day, we are launching a call for papers (detailed information in the next tab).