Big Data to end poverty?

Lately, i have written a whole series about Big Data.  I came across the World Bank movie about the importance of good data and how to make the big data revolution work for development. I enjoyed watching in and i hope you will too!

A reflection from the Bill and Mellinda Gates Foundation

Walking out the visitors center of Bill and Melinda Gates foundation visitors center, I realized that I have not written any new blog post on my blog for more than 6 months. Sometime daily preoccupation takes over life, and without noticing one loses those spaces for refection and for sharing those reflections.

I have just spent a week in Seattle, headquarter to Microsoft but also the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to join a meeting on how to make big data work the agricultural sector in the developing world. After the meeting, i spend half a day in the Gates Foundation visitors' centre, a place that has the ambition to inspire its visitors to make a difference.

The center is fully interactive, inviting the visitor to learn more about who Bill and Melinda Gates are, how they came about founding the foundation and its guiding principle. I admired the simplicity with which complex problem such health, poverty and education are addressed, without loosing its essence. 

I particularly enjoyed the intersecting wheels of agriculture that only could make turn the whole machinery if soils, water, seed, market and support comes together. I am still wondering why some of our research still does not consider theses interactions... and yes if you ask me the equation is missing livestock... (feed, water + seed, animal health, breeds, market and support).

The agricultural success machinery

Also there is a very instructive video on which Bill explains why he does not invest into climate change mitigation and why he actually does in biotechnology such as  GMOs. His reflection is quite simple, what has a market and is a business opportunity should be done by the industry, what is not is supported by Gates foundation. Drought tolerant seeds for the developing world are not sufficient commercial for the industry to develop them, yet they might play a critical role in mitigating climate change for the most vulnerable people in the world.

There are many things i did not know about Gates foundation. For example, it is behind the AGRA initiative, the initiative that among others funds many small and medium innovative enterprises in the agricultural sector in Africa. Also they run a whole program in the US to support homeless people, especially giving access to homeless children and youth to access high level education. One big effort also goes into health, among others into the eradication of polio and malaria.

As i left the visitors center, i walked to Seattle downtown realizing that already 4 times i directly or indirectly benefited from Gates Foundation money, for my multi-dimensional spatially explicit ex ante environmental trade-off model, for this conference on big data for the agricultural sector in the developing world and finally by making the new chicken breed Kuroiler available in East Africa combined with the AGRA conference on social enterprises. All four experiences have lead to radical rethinking of modelling approaches (that boldly ignore the farmer), of data collection, processing and dissemination (are our data portal really the answer?) or of sustainable business models for the poor. 

None of us has the right formula to make the world a better place for every one even those we tend to forget. We are all on a learning through trial and error journey, but some of us are radical re-thinker who challenge the status co (and have probably learned through errors). I have been deeply impressed by the strong vision that Bill and Melinda have, to question the question and invest time, money and passion to see their vision implemented on the ground both in the US and the developing world. Their objective is not only to bring change but to inspire others to bring change or to be an impatient optimist. The visit at the visitors centre has open my eyes on how much their vision and investment has given me the opportunity to re-think my work, to challenge my own small status co, how much they have actually inspired me to bring change without me noticing. 

At the end of the exhibition, the visitor is asked to come up with her/his own plan to contribute to make the world a better place... I decided to make sure that my blog becomes lively again, that it may be an (unbiased?) voice from the ground in the developing world and a space where reflection (radical rethinking?) is possible. I hope you will join the new start of this journey!

Who is poor?

In the past poverty was usually assessed with the famous 1 usd or 2 usd per day poverty lines. However, new poverty assessements are moving away from expenditures and income that are quite difficult to assess correctly to assets that can be assessed through farm household survey easily, as for example the demographic health surveys (DHS).

The wealth index is a composite measure of a household's cumulative living standard. The wealth index is calculated using easy-to-collect data on a household's ownership of selected assets, such as televisions and bicycles; materials used for housing construction; and types of water access and sanitation facilities. - See more at: http://www.dhsprogram.com/topics/wealth-index/Wealth-Index-Construction.cfm#sthash.aMwBEa0h.dpuf

Wealth index are the novel way to assess poverty and is computed for any DHS survey or farm household survey that has an extensive asset section. In most simple words, the wealth index ranks household based on assets and categorizes them into wealth quintile. 

In order to define the weight of every asset in the index, a principal component analysis is implemented. The first factor (loading) is used as weight. Find more info about the wealth index here.

However there are also downsides to wealth index. The main one is that it is a relative measurement of poverty that is computed for each country separately.

Many efforts are done to move away from country specific indexes to more regional ones allowing to compare poverty across countries. A very interesting approach is presented in this FAO working paper.

the magics of the washing machine

This is one of my favorite TED talks... and it fits pretty well on a Monday morning after having spent part of my week-end hand washing. (I am so grateful to have a cleaning lady that does the additional wash for me today).



In rural areas in developing countries, washing cloth takes a tremendous amount of time. Women need to carry water home for washing or carry all the wash to the water point. It is laborious work, which is also pretty bad for the back. As Hans Rosling mentions, women emancipation can only come if they get more time by doing household work more efficiently. He also mentions that this efficiency gain that all women around the world wish to have will create more pressure on the environment.

Some months ago i found this article http://www.gizmag.com/giradora-pedail-power-washer/23548/ about a pedal powered washing machine that could have similar effects described in Hans Rosling's TED talk, namely giving women more freedom and time for the children, without using more electricity, without additional pressure on the environment!

Convince yourself! 


It is definitely a technology worth to look at!

Rethink again, again : looking back on one year of Ethiopia

For those of you, who have followed my blog weekly, you will have noticed the longer Christmas break. It was time to stop, and take time for looking back on the last year, on one year of Ethiopia.
It has been an incredibly rich year. I talked to many farmers, youth, political leaders, poor and rich. When crossing developing countries, you can see many small battles that have been won : communities that have developed their own irrigation schemes, a hybrid potatoes that enable parents to pay the school fee of their kids or young people that successfully managed to start their own business. But there are also these frustrating moments when you realize that believes hamper innovation, when people are caught in a poverty trap when inflation hurts every one around you.
All the success and frustrating stories are the fuel to rethink again and again. After one year, the only thing that i have truly understood is that there is no silver bullet or an all-in-one solution, everything is so context specific. There are so many entry points to try to lift people out of poverty, but the right one has to be found in each specific solution and we still face many puzzles that we simply cannot understand.




On my flight back to Addis, I  read the book "poor-economics : a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty" by Banerjee and Duflo. (have a look at the book's website : http://www.pooreconomics.com/about-book). It is an amazing book, also resolving some of the big puzzles of development. As the poor usually have very little resources, economics has tended to ignore them. This books rewrites micro-economics, from the perspective of the poor, these "barefoot hedge fund managers", that in fact make much more rational choice that our usual average consumer. Because Banerjee and Duflo manage to undermine the macro dynamics of development with micro-economics of the poor, they manage to address some of the puzzles such as why despite of the high enrollment rate, so many kids are still illiterate or why heath care system for the poor do not work or why micro-credits is not always the miracle solutions.
Whereas like me the come to the conclusion that there is no silver bullet and we still ignore a lot, in their "in place of a sweeping conclusion" they come up with 5 things we do know about poverty and development.

1. the poor often lack critical pieces of information and believe things that are not true. Bringing simple pieces of information can make a big change in behavior.
2. the poor bear responsibility for too many aspects of their lives. The richer you are the more the "right" decisions are made for you. Many decisions poor are making aim at addressing the incredible amount of risk that they are facing. 
3. there are good reason why some markets are missing for the poor or that the poor face unfavorable prices in them. Technology and institutional innovations can be the key to address certain of the issues.
4. poor countries are not doomed to failure because they are poor. Many failures have less to do with some grand conspiracy of the elites to maintains their hold on the economy and more to do with some avoidable flaw in detailed design of policies, and the ubiquitous three Is : ignorance, ideology and inertia.
5. expectations about what people are able or unable to do all too often end up turning into self-fulfilling prophecies.Changing expectation is not easy but not impossible. 

"Despite these 5 lessons, we are very far from knowing everything we can and need to know. This book is, in a sense, just an invitation to look more closely. If we resit the kind of lazy, formulaic thinking that reduces every problem to the same set of general principles; if we listen to poor people themselves and force ourselves to understand the logic of their choice; if we accept the possibility of error and subject to every idea, including the most apparently commonsensical ones, to rigorous empirical testing, then we will be able not only to construct a toolbox to effective policies but also to better understand why the poor live the way they do. Armed with this patient understanding, we can identify the poverty traps where they really are and know which tools we need to give to the poor to help them get out of them". 

This book is a must for all these who have given up believing that development is possible, and for all those who are working in development and need food for thoughts to understand the puzzles they face a little bit better.

school feeding program in Germany?

Recently I had a post about the smart ways to fight famines. One of the option was the school feeding program, as children especially girls would go to school in order to get food. These girls will stay in school longer, will be healthier and will not get married too early. This girl will get less and more healthy children. Looks like a very smart way to address famine. I was very astonished to discover that this smart option is actually also implemented in Europe to support to poorest families. The only difference is, in the developing world it is mainly implemented in the rural world, whereas in Europe it is implemented in cities.

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beitrag/video/1444258/Kinderarmut-in-Deutschland