| Neena Bhandari Low and middle-income countries

Micro-estimates of wealth data ‘can help tackle poverty’

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.

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COVID-19 widens digital divide, but cuts e-waste

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 15.06.2021 (SciDev.Net): Consumption of electronic and electrical equipment at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic fell in low- and middle-income countries by almost a third, according to a UN report, despite a growing need to be connected with the world in lockdown.

While the reduction means that millions of tonnes of potential e-waste has been saved, it also highlights a deepening of the north-south digital divide, said the report, published 9 June by the UN University’s (UNU) Sustainable Cycles Programme (SCYCLE) and UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).

The report analysed Electric and Electronic Equipment consumption during the first three quarters of 2020 as compared to the “business as usual” scenario before the pandemic and used it to estimate future e-waste. Consumption of electronic and electrical equipment at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic fell in low- and middle-income countries by almost a third, according to a UN report, despite a growing need to be connected with the world in lockdown.

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