Technology and Global Development
15-502
Instructors:
M. Bernardine Dias and Yonina Cooper
TA: Aysha Siddique
Spring 2009
Lecture 4
Experiencing poverty…
Outline
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Logistics
Needs assessment
Exercise I
Experiencing poverty
Movie discussion
Exercise II
Measuring poverty and
development II
Your assignments for
next week
Logistics
• Guest lecture next week
• Any questions/comments?
Needs Assessment
Sometimes we don’t listen!
• Academic / bureaucratic self-gratification:
Excerpted from John McKnight article in the Other Side
http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/abcd/servanthood.html
"Mrs. Jones, we’re from such-and-such. We’re doing a survey. Can
you tell me how far you went in school?"
She looks down a little and says, "Well, I just got through tenth
grade." So they write on the clipboard, "Dropout. Two years."
Not "educated ten years" but "dropout two years.”
Then they say, "I wonder if you could read this to me."
She looks at it, embarrassed. "No. I can’t read."
"Illiterate," they write. Then they say, "Just now you squinted your
eyes. Do you have trouble seeing?"
"Yes. I think I need glasses."
"Visual deficit," they write. "Do you have any children?"
"Three daughters, ages fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen."
"Do any of them have children?"
The fourteen-year old has a child, and the eighteen-year-old has a
child.
"Teenage pregnancy," goes on the clipboard.
Then they say, "We’re going to get you some help. Just wait. We’re
going to make a service center here." And they cash in their
needs inventory for a GED dropout training center and three
people who work there, for an illiteracy program with four staff
people, for a neighborhood optometrist who is responsive to the
community, and for a new teenage-pregnancy counseling
program that gets the schools more money.
• If you asked the woman if she would prefer the services
or cash, which would she choose?
Listening to the Poor
At the turn of the new millennium, the World Bank collected
the voices of more than 60,000 poor women and men from
60 countries, in an unprecedented effort to understand
poverty from the perspective of the poor themselves. Voices
of the Poor, as this participatory research initiative is called,
chronicles the struggles and aspirations of poor people for a
life of dignity. Poor people are the true poverty experts. Poor
men and women reveal, in particular, that poverty is
multidimensional and complex -- raising new challenges to
local, national and global decision-makers. Poverty is
voicelessness. It's powerlessness. It's insecurity and
humiliation, say the poor across five continents.
www.worldbank.org/poverty/
Voices of the Poor
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Can Anyone Hear Us? analyzes the voices of
over 40,000 poor women and men in 50
countries from participatory poverty assessments
carried out by the World Bank in the 1990s
Crying Out for Change pulls together reports on
fieldwork conducted in 1999 in 23 countries
involving over 20,000 poor men and women
From Many Lands offers regional patterns and
country case studies
www.worldbank.org/poverty/
Some examples…
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"Poverty is like living in jail, living under bondage, waiting to be
free" — Jamaica
"Lack of work worries me. My children were hungry and I told
them the rice is cooking, until they fell asleep from hunger." — an
older man from Bedsa, Egypt.
"A better life for me is to be healthy, peaceful and live in love
without hunger. Love is more than anything. Money has no value in
the absence of love." — a poor older woman in Ethiopia
"When one is poor, she has no say in public, she feels inferior. She
has no food, so there is famine in her house; no clothing, and no
progress in her family." — a woman from Uganda
"For a poor person everything is terrible - illness, humiliation,
shame. We are cripples; we are afraid of everything; we depend on
everyone. No one needs us. We are like garbage that everyone wants
to get rid of." — a blind woman from Tiraspol, Moldova
www.worldbank.org/poverty/
Some things to think about
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For any ICTD project, it is important to
measure impact.
But measurement is fraught with pitfalls
– Assessment measures can themselves be (or
become) negative labels.
– Good baseline data can be hard to obtain
– Comparison across communities is difficult
Some challenges when doing
ICTD field work…
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Transportation
Pace of life
Cultural differences
Language barriers
Housing
Entrée into community
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Disease
Food
Poor health care facilities
Violence
Corruption
Plenty more…
Needs Assessment Exercise
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You are all part of a small team within Carnegie Mellon
University’s TechBridgeWorld group.
Your new assignment is in a small village in Iran, where a donor
wishes you to improve the standard of living using technology.
Your first goal (as it should be) is to assess the needs of
this community.
Work together to come up with a plan to assess the needs of
this community.
You can make the following assumptions:
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You are a small group with a small budget
The community is a small village in Iran where most people live on
daily wages
You can ask the instructors any questions you think might be
necessary to plan a needs assessment strategy for this community
You can’t use any other resources
You have 20 minutes to complete this assignment (this is a little
unrealistic but it’s not unheard of if you are already in the field)
Experiencing
Poverty
Why experience poverty?
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To be able to respond compassionately and
with respect
To make appropriate and accurate
assumptions in our models/analyses/designs
To better understand the consequences of
our labels and actions
To better understand ourselves?
How can we experience poverty?
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Personal experience
Peace Corps or similar program
Faith-based organization-sponsored programs
“Hybrids” or cultural translators
Communicating with people living in poverty
Simulations and virtual reality
– Poverty Simulation at Carnegie Mellon on November
1st – organized by TechBridgeWorld
• Documentaries, movies
• Novels, travel literature
Dollar Street
http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/presentations/dollar-street-2002.html
A walk in a slum
http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/presentations/a-slum-insight-2006.html
Real lives
http://www.educationalsimulations.com/eval.php
Movie Discussion
• Does this match your view of living in poverty?
• How are the relationships depicted in the film. Are they
believable?
• Are the relationships similar or different than you would
expect?
• What are the challenges the family has in the film?
• Are these challenges unique to living in poverty? Unique to
living in Tehran?
• Is the film far from reality? A romanticization of a poor
community?
• What aspects, if any, about the community in the movie
surprised you?
Class Exercise
• Now, put yourselves, as best as you can, in the roles of the
members of the community in the movie.
– I.e. the characters in the movie
• Assess the needs assessment proposal you came up with earlier.
– Do you think it will work? Why or why not?
– What strengths and limitations do you perceive for this proposal from the
perspective of the community?
– What critiques do you have of the proposals?
– Would you have gotten to the authentic needs of the community?
– What aspects of the community did you feel you were unable to represent?
Preparing for your experience
• Prepare by learning not only about the big picture but also about the
little details of daily life
• Keep in mind that each community will have their own cultural
practices and traditions and they might be very different from your own
• Always keep in mind that there will be aspects of the experience you
couldn’t prepare for
• Beware of romaticizations, over-simplifications, and generalizations
• Cultural hybrids can play an important role in interpreting
your experience
• Take some time to reflect on yourself – what things make you uneasy?
Happy? How do you react to different situations? How can you better
handle different situations?
• Allocate time for analyzing and learning from your experience
• Be prepared to question your fundamental assumptions – you might be
misinterpreting what you see or hear or feel
• Seek and work with trust structures and cultural traditions within the
community to the best of your ability
Measuring Poverty II
Measuring Poverty
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To compute a poverty measure, three
ingredients are needed:
1. One has to define the relevant welfare measure.
2. One has to select a poverty line – that is a
threshold below which a given household or
individual will be classified as poor.
3. One has to select a poverty indicator– which is
used for reporting for the population as a whole
or for a population sub-group only.
www.worldbank.org/poverty/
Welfare Measure
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There are qualitative and quantitative measures
Most efforts focus on monetary dimensions of well-being
Consumption vs. income as a poverty indicator
Adjustments:
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differences in needs between households and
intra-household inequalities
differences in prices across regions and at different points in time
input and investment expenditure
missing price and quantity information
rationing
under-reporting
Non-monetary dimensions of poverty: health poverty,
education poverty, etc.
Composite indices
www.worldbank.org/poverty/
Subjective perceptions
Poverty Line
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Relative poverty lines
Absolute poverty lines
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Food-energy intake method
Cost of basic needs method
Other methods are possible
Ultimately, the choice is somewhat arbitrary
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Must resonate with social norms for acceptance
Common understanding of what represents a minimum
Stability and consistence important for comparisons
over time
Qualitative data can also be useful
www.worldbank.org/poverty/
Poverty Indicators
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The poverty measure itself is a statistical function which translates the
comparison of the indicator of well being and the poverty line which
is made for each household into one aggregate number for the
population as a whole or a population sub-group.
Many alternative measures exist but following 3 measures are most
commonly used:
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Incidence of poverty (headcount index)
Depth of poverty (poverty gap)
Poverty severity (squared poverty gap)
Depth and severity might be particularly important for the evaluation
of programs and policies.
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A program might be very effective at reducing the number of poor (the
incidence of poverty) but might do so only by lifting those who were
those closest to the poverty line out of poverty (low impact on the
poverty gap).
Other interventions might better address the situation of the very poor
but have a low impact on the overall incidence (if it brings the very
poor closer to the poverty line but not above it).
www.worldbank.org/poverty/
What are GDP and PPP?
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GDP
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Gross Domestic Product
Total cost of all finished goods and services produced
within the country in a stipulated period of time (usually
a 365-day year)
GDP = consumption + gross investment + government spending
+ (exports − imports)
PPP
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Purchasing Power Parity
Uses the long-term equilibrium exchange rate of two
currencies to equalize their purchasing power
Equalizes the purchasing power of different currencies
in their home countries for a given basket of goods
HDR Indicators
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Human Development Index (HDI) value
Life expectancy at birth (years) 2005
Adult literacy rate (% aged 15 and above) 1995-2005
Combined gross enrolment ratio for primary, secondary and
tertiary education (%) 2005
GDP per capita (PPP US$)
Life expectancy index
Education index
GDP index
GDP per capita (PPP US$) rank minus HDI rank
http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_20072008_Tech_Note_1.pdf
Other References
• 15502 lecture slides from 2006 and 2007 –
jointly prepared by Rahul Tongia, Joe
Mertz, Jay Aronson, and Bernardine Dias
• Most images are from TechBridgeWorld
(www.techbridgeworld.org)
What Next?
• All about capacity building
• Find out more about poverty in Qatar and the conditions
of the labor camps in Qatar – do people in these camps
experience poverty? (for Tuesday’s class)
• Reading/viewing assignments for next week:
– Due Tuesday
• Watch the “Waters of Ayole” short video (information for viewing
this video will be sent via email)
– Due Thursday
• Read pp 117-123 of “Banker to the Poor” by Muhammad Yunus
(available on reserve at the library)
– Preparation questions on all reading and viewing assignments are
available on the course website in the “assignments” section.
• Special note: first do the reading/viewing and then look at the
questions and come prepared to discuss them in class.