PRME Working Group on Poverty Conference

In spite of the fact that poverty has been reduced in some countries to date, approximately 50% of the world’s 7 billion people still live on less than US$2/day. Increasingly, multinational corporations, entrepreneurs, social businesses, and social investors are working to eradicate poverty in creative, innovative ways. Whether the academic research coming from business schools and programmes captures this vitality and whether the design of management education programmes and curricula develops managers to address the challenge of poverty in the 21st century is open to debate.

This conference focuses on poverty eradication as a responsibility of business and its implications for business curriculum and strategy. As such, this conference has these four goals:

• To take the issue of poverty out of its “academic tower” through a day-long, immersion field experience in a poor community for all participants
• To use Nicaragua as a learning/innovation laboratory through discussions with government, business, non-profit, community, student, and youth-services leaders involved in local and regional poverty alleviation programmes
• To create opportunities for an exchange of ideas, perspectives and best practices through active, cross-discipline and cross sector discussions
• To develop a more sustainable, inclusive educational/research model in management education that moves the issue of poverty eradication from being peripheral in business curricula and programmes to a more central standing.

Towards these goals, the conference will integrate the issue of corruption, connecting the work of the PRME Working Group on Poverty with the PRME Working Group on Anti-Corruption, and sharing the resources developed by the groups for integrating into the cross-cutting challenges into management education (see Anti-Corruption Toolkit here, and release of the 1st Poverty book here).

Conference Host Institution: INCAE, a private, non-profit, multinational, higher education organisation devoted to teaching and research endeavors in the fields of business and economics with an emphasis in integral Latin American development. INCAE focuses on managerial training, from a global perspective, of individuals capable of successfully holding top management positions in Latin America.

Conference Format

The conference will blend traditional paper presentations with small group break-out sessions and a day-long, field immersion experience on day 2. The conference will give delegates opportunities for interaction with policy and community leaders as well as with one another.

Delegates will be housed on the INCAE campus, Francisco de Sola, Nicaragua.

Simultaneous translation will be provided for all sessions.

Conference fee is all-inclusive including shared accommodations on the INCAE campus, all meals, transportation for the day-long field experience, all conference materials and transportation to and from the Managua international airport. Not included: Airfare to and from the conference and incidental, personal expenses.

Note: A limited number of conference scholarships are available. Please request scholarship information and criteria by contacting: povertyconference@incae.edu

View conference website here.

View the event proceedings here.