About Claudine Sauvain-Dugerdil

She is professor emeritus at IDESO (Institute of demography and socioeconomy, University of Geneva, Switzerland). She made most of her career in this institution which she directed from 2001 to 2011, but with windows to the outside through her master's degree at UCLA, three years of Cooperation in Honduras, her residency and activities in the Val de Bagnes and field investigations in Central America and West Africa. In particular, she carried out field research since the mid-1970s in a small isolated Dogon population in north-central Mali and developed institutional collaborations in Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Cameroon. Marked by the vision of Albert Jacquard, the common thread of her research is to understand diversity and the sources of inequalities by dealing with family demography, gender systems, life course, time use, the links between population and development and the ethics of research. She has discovered the Capabilities Approach through Sen’s “Development as Freedom” and her participation to the European program Gender and Wellbeing (2006-09) and applied it in a research in Mali and Ghana, published as a special issue of African Population Studies http://aps.journals.ac.za/pub/issue/view/58. Since 2018 she is chair of a Capabilities panel at UAPS (Union for African Population Studies).