Why better data is the key to tackling poverty

We across the development community talk a lot about data gaps, and how important it is to fill them. Consider this statistic: shared prosperity (income growth of the bottom 40 percent) during the last decade can only be measured properly for less than half of the World Bank Group’s client countries.

The Policy Research Report gives us solid arguments as to why now is the time to move past discussion and take real, concrete action to improve the quality and frequency of data collection to measure progress toward the twin goals and to identify the drivers of progress in every country. More and better data are critical to build on our Systematic Country Diagnostics that are creating a solid evidence base to enhance the impact of our support to countries, while identifying data gaps that affect the quality of that evidence.

Improving the quality and frequency of data requires financing and innovation, and the collective will of the development community. It means working differently to make sure that we don’t just know how many people live in extreme poverty, or what the growth rate is among the bottom 40% in every country, but that we use these data to find what needs to be done to make markets, institutions, governments and development agencies work better for poor people. Making data an integral part of the development agenda also requires building a diverse community of stakeholders who “champion” and demand data. This is possible if the development community and governments step up their efforts in making data openly available, inviting scrutiny and free flow of ideas on the use and interpretations of data.

As the Policy Research Report points out, making data work for everyone will take efforts to improve countries’ capacity to collect and assess data, and innovations in statistical methods and data collection technologies. The combination of statistical methods and information technology offers opportunities that would have seemed implausible even a few years back. For example, World Bank teams are fielding surveys through mobile phones to collect real-time data on well-being in remote or fragile areas, and experimenting with systems to collect data, upload them to the “cloud” for validation and use in statistical models to obtain welfare estimates almost instantaneously.

That said, we must recognise that there is no short-cut – technology and statistical methods do not offer a silver bullet where capacity and institutions are lacking, which is why investments in country capacity and statistical systems must go together with expanding the frontiers of innovation in surveys.   The costs of such investments are modest relative to total aid. A recent estimate places resources needed to produce such good quality data for a large number of low-income countries to be around 300 million per year.

Now is the time to mobilise real and sustained resources to fill data gaps, improve data quality, and boost country capacity to keep those gaps filled moving forward. This will provide the evidence base to ensure that policies are timely, well-targeted, and effective for the poor and most vulnerable. What are we waiting for?

Published in collaboration with The World Bank

Authors: Ana Revenga is the Senior Director of the Poverty Global Practice at the World Bank Group. Maura K. Leary is the Communications Lead for the World Bank Group’s Poverty Global Practice, managing strategic communications and outreach on poverty reduction, equity, and inequality

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