Poverty in the Era of Data

Fourth, it is possible to determine how personal circumstances affect human opportunity. We all know that children have no control or responsibility over their gender, skin color, birthplace, or parents’ income. And yet, those kind of circumstances are sure-shot predictors of a child’s access to vaccination, potable water, kindergarten, the internet and many other platforms without which her probability of success is close to nil — well before she can make any choice by herself. This can now be measured, something that was impossible only a few years ago. The measure is called “Human Opportunity Index,” and is beginning to change how social policy is designed.
Finally, we have broken the taboo of experimenting with people. It is no longer unusual for researchers to walk into a slum, offer child care to a sample of mothers, and then monitor whether they work outside the home more hours than those with no child care at all. (FYI: they don’t always do). These type of “randomized trials” are proving really useful to assess what policies and what projects work best — and which are a waste of time and money. From giving cheap fertilizer to farmers to making cheap loans to female micro-entrepreneurs, you can evaluate anything, as long as you have — or create — the data.
By now, you are probably wondering where all this data is going to come from. Isn’t it true that most national statistical offices in the developing world are somewhere between weak and very weak? After all, those all-important household surveys, when they exist, get published years after they are collected. Millions are rightly being spent to upgrade statistical capacity. But it takes a long, long while before you see results — which explains why politicians rarely care about it.
Is there a short-cut? Is there a fast way to get the data we need to help the poor? Yes, and it is probably sitting in your pocket, in your purse or on your belt. It is your cell-phone. It turns out that people will happily sign up to answer a couple of short phone surveys a month in exchange for “free minutes” of phone use. How many minutes? On average, less than five dollars worth of minutes per month. (Yes, that’s how cheap we all are.) This is a bargain because you don’t have to call more than a tenth of 1 percent of your population to get a good reading of how your country is doing.
As the use of cellular telephony expands among the poor — at flash speed in places like Kenya –the possibility of turning them into data sources becomes real. In fact, some of this is already happening in Latin-America, and may soon catch on in Africa. Others will surely follow. How ironic that, in the end, the war against poverty may be won when those who try to help the poor get to literally listen to them.
Follow Marcelo Giugale on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@Marcelo_WB