Strengths and limitations of relative wealth indices derived from big data in Indonesia.

Accurate relative wealth estimates in Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICS) are crucial to help policymakers address socio-demographic inequalities under the guidance of the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations. Survey-based approaches have traditionally been employed to collect highly granular data about income, consumption, or household material goods to create index-based poverty estimates. However, these methods are only capture persons in households (i.e., in the household sample framework) and they do not include migrant populations or unhoused citizens. Novel approaches combining frontier data, computer vision, and machine learning have been proposed to complement these existing approaches. However, the strengths and limitations of these big-data-derived indices have yet to be sufficiently studied. In this paper, we focus on the case of Indonesia and examine one frontier-data derived Relative Wealth Index (RWI), created by the Facebook Data for Good initiative, that utilizes connectivity data from the Facebook Platform and satellite imagery data to produce a high-resolution estimate of relative wealth for 135 countries. We examine it concerning asset-based relative wealth indices estimated from existing high-quality national-level traditional survey instruments, the USAID-developed Demographic Health Survey (DHS), and the Indonesian National Socio-economic survey (SUSENAS). In this work, we aim to understand how the frontier-data derived index can be used to inform anti-poverty programs in Indonesia and the Asia Pacific region. First, we unveil key features that affect the comparison between the traditional and non-traditional sources, such as the publishing time and authority and the granularity of the spatial aggregation of the data. Second, to provide operational input, we hypothesize how a re-distribution of resources based on the RWI map would impact a current social program, the Social Protection Card (KPS) of Indonesia and assess impact. In this hypothetical scenario, we estimate the percentage of Indonesians eligible for the program, which would have been incorrectly excluded from a social protection payment had the RWI been used in place of the survey-based wealth index. The exclusion error in that case would be 32.82%. Within the context of the KPS program targeting, we noted significant differences between the RWI map's predictions and the SUSENAS ground truth index estimates.

Using open-source data to construct 20 metre resolution maps of children's travel time to the nearest health facility.

Physical access to health facilities is an important factor in determining treatment seeking behaviour and has implications for targets within the Sustainable Development Goals, including the right to health. The increased availability of high-resolution land cover and road data from satellite imagery offers opportunities for fine-grained estimations of physical access which can support delivery planning through the provision of more realistic estimates of travel times. The data presented here is of travel time to health facilities in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Mozambique. Travel times have been calculated for different facility types in each country such as Dispensaries, Health Centres, Clinics and Hospitals. Cost allocation surfaces and travel times are provided for child walking speeds but can be altered easily to account for adult walking speeds and motorised transport. With a focus on Uganda, we describe the data and method and provide the travel maps, software and intermediate datasets for Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Children in Monetary Poor Households: Baseline and COVID-19 Impact for 2020 and 2021.

The impact of the global economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will not affect all children equally: those in poorer households and children who are disadvantaged face the most serious consequences. As parents lose their jobs and incomes, the impact on children living in impoverished households must be measured. In this article, we assess the economic consequences of the pandemic on these children. Given that poorer families have a larger number of children than other families, the analysis first establishes the proportion of children living in monetary poor households, as defined by national standards, across developing countries. Then, using historical changes and trends of income distribution per country, the latest projections about economic decline due to the pandemic, and demographic information about the distribution of children by deciles, we estimate the expected increase in the number of children in monetary poor households in developing countries as of end of 2020 to be an additional 122-144 million and, at best, a moderate decline in these numbers by end of 2021.

El Boom de las Transferencias de Dinero Sujetas a Condiciones. ¿De qué Manera Estos Programas Social

Millones de personas alrededor del mundo no tienen acceso a servicios básicos (salud, educación, agua potable y vivienda digna), protección social y un mínimo ingreso. Muchos niños, niñas y adolescentes, uno de los grupos más vulnerables, se encuentran entre los directamente excluidos de dichos servicios básicos, dando lugar a un amplio espectro de privaciones. A modo de solución, diferentes organismos internacionales, agencias y gobiernos impulsan programas sociales que ofrecen transferencias directas de dinero sujetas a una serie de condiciones, que por lo general están relacionadas con la asistencia de los hijos menores a la escuela y de la familia a los centros de salud.

"Delivering" on the MDGs?: equity and maternal health in Ghana, Ethiopia and Kenya.

OBJECTIVES: The Millennium Development Goals (MIDGs) have put maternal health in the mainstream, but there is a need to go beyond the MDGs to address equity within countries. We argue that MDG focus on maternal health is necessary but not sufficient. This paper uses Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from Kenya, Ethiopia and Ghana to examine a set of maternal health indicators stratified along five different dimensions. The study highlights the interactive and multiple forms of disadvantage and demonstrates that equity monitoring for the MDGs is possible, even given current data limitations. METHODS: We analyse DHS data from Ghana, Kenya and Ethiopia on four indicators: skilled birth attendant, contraceptive prevalence rate, AIDS knowledge and access to a health facility. We define six social strata along five different dimensions: poverty status, education, region, ethnicity and the more traditional wealth quintile. Data are stratified singly (e.g. by region) and then stratified simultaneously (e.g. by region and by education) in order to examine the compounded effect of dual forms of vulnerability. RESULTS: Almost all disparities were found to be significant, although the stratifier with the strongest effect on health outcomes varied by indicator and by country. In some cases, urban-dwelling is a more significant advantage than wealth and in others, educational status trumps poverty status. The nuances of this analysis are important for policymaking processes aimed at reaching the MDGs and incorporating maternal health in national development plans. CONCLUSIONS: The article highlights the following key points about inequities and maternal health: 1) measuring and monitoring inequity in access to maternal health is possible even in low resource settings-using current data 2) statistically significant health gaps exist not just between rich and poor, but across other population groups as well, and multiple forms of disadvantage confer greater risk and 3) policies must be aligned with reducing health gaps in access to key maternal health services.

El boom de las transferencias de dinero sujetas a condiciones: ¿de qué manera estos programas sociales benefician a los niños y niñas latinoamericanas? / Conditional cash transfers boom: how do these programs benefit children in latin american?

Millones de personas alrededor del mundo no tienen acceso a servicios básicos (salud, educación, agua potable y vivienda digna), protección social y un mínimo ingreso. Muchos niños, niñas y adolescentes, uno de los grupos más vulnerables, se encuentran entre los directamente excluidos de dichos servicios básicos, dando lugar a un amplio espectro de privaciones. A modo de solución, diferentes organismos internacionales, agencias y gobiernos impulsan programas sociales que ofrecen transferencias directas de dinero sujetas a una serie de condiciones, que por lo general están relacionadas con la asistencia de los hijos menores a la escuela y de la familia a los centros de salud. Basándonos en lo que las políticas sociales representan: instrumentos que permiten fortalecer la ciudadanía, la participación, la inclusión social y la equidad, el imponer condiciones a los grupos más carenciados, para que así alcancen beneficios económicos, constituye una contradicción o una paradoja significativa que requiere ser analizada...

El boom de las transferencias de dinero sujetas a condiciones: ¿de qué manera estos programas sociales benefician a los niños y niñas latinoamericanas? / Conditional cash transfers boom: how do these programs benefit children in latin american?

Millones de personas alrededor del mundo no tienen acceso a servicios básicos (salud, educación, agua potable y vivienda digna), protección social y un mínimo ingreso. Muchos niños, niñas y adolescentes, uno de los grupos más vulnerables, se encuentran entre los directamente excluidos de dichos servicios básicos, dando lugar a un amplio espectro de privaciones. A modo de solución, diferentes organismos internacionales, agencias y gobiernos impulsan programas sociales que ofrecen transferencias directas de dinero sujetas a una serie de condiciones, que por lo general están relacionadas con la asistencia de los hijos menores a la escuela y de la familia a los centros de salud. Basándonos en lo que las políticas sociales representan: instrumentos que permiten fortalecer la ciudadanía, la participación, la inclusión social y la equidad, el imponer condiciones a los grupos más carenciados, para que así alcancen beneficios económicos, constituye una contradicción o una paradoja significativa que requiere ser analizada...(AU)

Setting the stage for equity-sensitive monitoring of the maternal and child health Millennium Development Goals.

OBJECTIVE: This analysis seeks to set the stage for equity-sensitive monitoring of the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). METHODS: We use data from international household-level surveys (Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS)) to demonstrate that establishing an equity baseline is necessary and feasible, even in low-income and data-poor countries. We assess data from six countries using 11 health indicators and six social stratifiers. Simple bivariate stratification is complemented by simultaneous stratification to expose the compound effect of multiple forms of vulnerability. FINDINGS: The data reveal that inequities are complex and interactive: inferences cannot be drawn about the nature or extent of inequities in health outcomes from a single stratifier or indicator. CONCLUSION: The MDGs and other development initiatives must become more comprehensive and explicit in their analysis and tracking of inequities. The design of policies to narrow health gaps must take into account country-specific inequities.

Monitoring equity in immunization coverage.

This paper analyses trends in coverage of three doses of diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccine (DPT3) by wealth groups in selected countries. It discusses the depth of disparities in coverage by wealth and changes during the 1990s. Complete assessment of equity in income and its trends have been discussed in other papers, however issues related to children's well-being have often been brushed aside because the comparable data needed to fully understand and rectify inequalities is lacking. A focal point of this paper pertains to gathering any and all information recorded about the immunization of children and then transcribing these data so that it is applicable to all countries. We analyse the technical difficulties and methodological solutions that would enable comparisons to be made between various measures of inequity taken from different surveys at two or three points in time among a variety of subpopulations in order to obtain disaggregated data. This paper argues for a simultaneous analysis of changes in averages and disparities in immunization coverage along variables of interest, such as wealth, gender and place of residence in order to achieve a better understanding of trends. We also focus on measurement issues and describe trends in immunization by wealth. We conclude with a brief discussion of issues related to monitoring equitable outcomes and offer suggestions for further research. In addition, the paper presents some lessons that can be drawn about monitoring and policies. We hope that this analysis of patterns of disparities will help policy-makers in devising, proposing and executing efficient policies and interventions.