The nonprofit uses AI to tackle poverty
Thoughts on big ideas, pandemic's impact on poverty, and how GiveDirectly is trying to solve it via innovation
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been named the Time magazine “Person of the Year”. If you ask anyone around the world he or she will tell the real changemakers of 2020 are the “Doctors and Frontline workers”. And not politicians.
On a different note, I want to give the award to LinkedIn - my bae for 2020.
It is the only social network I am active and as much I hate the network at times it still is fun and informative. I can write an essay on how people have behaved on the network in the last 9 months after the pandemic hit us.
The network also drives me some traffic to my boring blog which you are reading now. So thank you :) LinkedIn is also my only hope as a consultant to find new work. And sometimes people do connect with me for professional reasons.
Last week, a social entrepreneur messaged me. Pranjal Dubey has an interesting story and purpose that more and more people should be aware of.
Before founding the Sant Singaji Institute of Science and Management, Pranjal gave more than a decade to Sap Labs India. Pranjal belongs to Sandalpur, MP. During one of the visits to his ancestral village, a situation forced him to think of how he can help the rural youth to not only educate but help them move out, find work and grow with the world. So after a lot of research, and brainstorming he decides to open up the institute in 2010.
Here is a video from Josh Talks, where Pranjal shares his journey and the dream so far. I found it really interesting and inspiring.
Is it a big idea?
For me, any idea that has the power to change lives at the grassroots level is a big idea.
Initially, when the pandemic hit the world I somehow believed that the virus would create a slight balance in society. I was totally wrong. The world’s billionaires “did extremely well” during the coronavirus pandemic, growing their already-huge fortunes to a record high of $10.2tn (£7.8tn).
Leaving the rich vs poor debate for the time being. If we say the year was tough for us then how do you think it would have been for the poor and poorest.
The World Bank says that COVID-19 will add as many as 150 million extremely poor people by 2021. “The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to push an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty this year, with the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021.”
“Global extreme poverty is expected to rise in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years as the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic compounds the forces of conflict and climate change, which were already slowing poverty reduction progress.”
According to the Biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report: “Extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 a day, is likely to affect between 9.1% and 9.4% of the world’s population in 2020.”
Had the pandemic not convulsed the globe, the poverty rate was expected to drop to 7.9% in 2020.
According to the Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020: four of every five individuals living below the international poverty line reside in rural areas, circa 2018, although the rural population accounts for only 48% of the global population.
“Climate change also poses both acute and medium-term threats to poverty reduction, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia—the regions where most of the global poor are concentrated. The World Bank’s Shock Waves report estimated that, if unaddressed, climate change has the potential to push more than 100 million people into poverty by 2030.”
The forces propelling the upsurge in global poverty affect every part of the world, but they are hitting Sub-Saharan Africa especially hard. Extreme poverty was already becoming increasingly concentrated there even before the crisis: among the world’s economies for which poverty can be measured, 18 of the 20 poorest are in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Togo is a country in West Africa by Ghana, Benin, and Burkina Faso and is home to approximately 7.8 million people. Nearly 81.2 percent of Togo’s rural population lives under the global poverty line. This makes Togo one of the world’s poorest countries.
During this ongoing pandemic, GiveDirectly a charity that has focused for just under a decade on direct cash transfers to people in poverty around the world, particularly in Africa initiated a project in Togo. It uses artificial intelligence designed by UC Berkeley to identify the poorest individuals in the poorest areas and transfer cash relief directly to them.
According to FastCompany: In April, in response to COVID-19, Togo’s government established an innovative cash transfer system called Novissi, spearheaded by Cina Lawson, Togo’s Minister of Postal Affairs and Digital Economy. This allowed the government to send cash relief via mobile to approximately 12% of the population.
In 2017, Josh Blumenstock, associate professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, first wrote the paper on mapping poverty using satellite and mobile data.
Speaking to FastCompany Josh said that the algorithm works in two stages - first, it finds the poorest neighborhoods or villages in a certain region, by analyzing high-resolution satellite imagery. Once the geography is set, the second stage is finding the poorest individuals within those areas, by analyzing their mobile phone data.
After the poorest individuals are identified, they will be prompted to enroll via mobile phone, and then instantly paid. They can then withdraw cash at local shops. “The aim is to pick out as many extremely poor as possible, as quickly as possible,” says Han Sheng Chia, special projects director at GiveDirectly.
“Approximately $5 million will be delivered in total, sending cash every month for five months, in the sum of $15 for women and $13 for men per month, which they’ve calculated as the figure to cover their “minimum basket of goods” to survive. So far, 30,000 Togolese have been paid, out of a goal of 58,000, or the poorest 10%.”
Definitely an innovation and a great example of AI for good. But the whole model puts individual security at risk. The team says it is minimizing the data shared and accessed, and through anonymizing and encrypting it.
“It’s not as perfect as one would like it to be,” Blumenstock says. “To the extent that we’re sort of stepping on privacy concerns, it really is necessary to make the program work.”
The nonprofit is planning to scale the model into countries like Bangladesh and Nigeria.
However, the cash injection model has had its own challenges this year. The services were stopped in Ugandan when failed to explain their source of funding.
The NGO Bureau also found that giving people money directly is likely to make them lazy, promote idleness, domestic violence, dependency syndrome, and tension within neighboring villages.
GiveDirectly’s no strings attached cash transfers to the world’s most vulnerable is a big idea being funded by TED’s The Audacious Project.
According to the website:
“Launched in 2018, The Audacious Project has already shown what humanity can accomplish when bold ideas meet real resources. From the thousands of people in the US awaiting trials from home because of The Bail Project’s fast growth to the hundreds of thousands of smallscale farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa enjoying better harvests because of One Acre Fund’s increased capacity, The Audacious Project is empowering social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders to take on the world’s biggest and most urgent challenges.”
GiveDirectly also aims to demonstrate the potential of data-informed crisis relief across different contexts and improve the scale and effectiveness of future humanitarian responses.
The nonprofit has worked with Google.org in the past setting up early methodologies that will make rendering aid and tracking its impact even easier. Google.org and GiveDirectly are developing a New York-based rapid response team that will be ready to deploy as soon as the next major disaster strikes a particularly vulnerable community.
“Google’s engineers will use satellite and census data to figure out exactly which areas seem hardest hit and most critically affected. The teams will then send their own squad to meet with victims in the field. The team is already brainstorming exactly how it will organize a call center and what types of questions it should ask recipients to trace efficacy over time. GiveDirectly has also formed a relationship with PayPal’s HyperWallet service, so it can remotely add money to each debit relief card after it’s distributed.”
Google.org recently supported GiveDirectly and USAID’s research that details the 18-month midline results from an impact evaluation that benchmarked Huguka Dukore to unconditional cash grants, provided via mobile money.
“The cost-equivalent cash grant performed significantly better than Huguka Dukore at increasing monthly income, productive assets, subjective well-being, beneficiary consumption, and household livestock wealth”.
Big tech and their funding for research have a dark side. The recent case of Timnit Gebru’s exit from Google. Speaking to Venturebeat she made it clear that she is really not happy with Google portraying her as the angry Black Woman.
“I don’t want to be in these institutions that are hostile to Black women. I think I tried everything I could to try to make a little livable nugget of these institutions for people like the ethical AI team. I want to make sure that whatever I do next that I’m in a safe environment that doesn’t gaslight me and I don’t have to fight so hard to do something that is important to my community.”
Meanwhile, you can check out some of the big ideas of 2020 and if you wish so you can donate too.