By Neena Bhandari
Sydney, 25.01.2022 (SciDev.Net): A data project charting poverty levels in detail across the global South could help policymakers better target social assistance and humanitarian aid, researchers say.
The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened poverty globally, with an estimated 97 million more people, most of them in LMICs, pushed into extreme poverty in 2021, according to the World Bank. But a dearth of reliable and up-to-date poverty data in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) poses a major challenge for governments and civil society.
To bridge this data gap, researchers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and the Data for Good programme, which collates data from Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, have developed a public data set of Relative Wealth Index (RWI), which provides micro-estimates of wealth of all populated areas in the 135 LMICs. The study was published in PNAS on 18 January.