Tech

Research opens a ‘new frontier’ in tackling global poverty


Nghiên cứu của Stanford mở ra một 'biên giới mới' trong việc giải quyết nghèo đói toàn cầu

Nearly 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa did not have access to electricity from the central grid in 2018. In this map, countries are colored according to the number of people without access to electricity. Uganda, with about 24 million people without electricity in 2018, is marked with a red outline. Credit: Ratledge et al, 2022, Nature

With electricity comes prosperity, right? The answer seems obvious—that electricity is key to economic growth and other social benefits like better health. But in the world’s poorest regions, where resources to improve livelihoods are scarce, it’s unclear how much better off people will get when they have access to electricity.

Now, however, a new Stanford study is published November 16 in the journal Nature discovered some of the strongest and most direct evidence for the extent to which electrified fuels economic growth in the developing world. The study is the first to build on a pioneering technique recently developed at Stanford that combines satellite imagery and artificial intelligence (AI) to measure and study poverty in new ways. which was not possible before.

Research — co-authored by Marshall Burke, associate professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR); Nathan Ratledge, PhD. students majoring in environment and resources at Doerr School; and others—reviewed the economic impacts of Uganda’s expansion grid.

The researchers found that communities with access to electricity experienced nearly twice as many improvements in their economic livelihoods as areas without electricity. They measure changes in livelihoods based on the increases they identify in the construction of homes, equipment, and other tangible assets that indicate economic wealth.

“We provide the first causal evidence of how access to electricity affects economic well-being at the scale of an entire country in Africa,” said Ratledge, lead author of the study.

The study comes as the plight of the developing world took center stage at last week’s United Nations climate change meeting of world leaders in Cairo. Ratledge notes that around 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are still without access to electricity. In Uganda, one of the countries in the world poorest countryThe electricity grid covers 41 percent of its land area as of 2019—up from 12 percent in 2010.

Open research ability to inform policy

When Ratledge first learned about electrification in Africa five years ago, he hit a common stumbling block: He couldn’t find grid maps anywhere on the continent that would allow him to analyze progress over time. “It’s hard in many low-income countries to get any reliable dataand especially the data that repeats over time,” he said. “In many cases, it doesn’t exist.”

As it happened, Burke — along with David Lobell, senior fellow at SIEPR and professor of Earth system science; and Stefano Ermon, associate professor of computer science—are working on a new tool that promises to address this data gap and other problems development economists face when trying to understand poverty. how it changes over time.

Their technique revolves around “deep learning”—in this case, a form of AI in which an algorithm is trained to detect patterns and extract information from images—which the scholars then apply to free access. satellite images turn back time. The researchers applied this method to studying property wealth at the community level across Africa, which is a common way to measure economic well-being in developing countries. Burke and his collaborators detailed their innovation in a posts in 2020 In natural communication.

The Uganda study marks the first time the technique has been used to assess the impact of a particular policy—a possibility that researchers have long hoped would materialize. In this case, Ratledge and his co-authors focused on the rapid expansion of Uganda’s electricity grid in 2011 and 2012. To study its impact over time, they combined maps. Newly developed digitization of the country’s electricity grid from 2005 to 2016 with satellite- estimated wealth from a “study carefullyThe model was trained on data covering nearly 642,000 households in 27,000 villages across sub-Saharan Africa.

The researchers found that communities with access to electricity increased their wealth rates by about twice as much as those without electricity.

“This insight would not have been possible just a few years ago,” says Burke. “And that’s because we now have this technique to give local-level measurements of important economic outcomes at scale, across space, and over time.”

Although the technique is still somewhat new, Burke predicts that continued advances in low-cost, ultra-powerful computing will soon help researchers study policies and programs in any country, whether rich or poor, the aim of poverty reduction is easily accessible. For example, think about policies that affect agricultural development, health, and infrastructure.

Ratledge agrees. “This technique opens up a whole new and significantly different frontier for measuring economic growth across emerging countries,” he said. “It’s actually pretty awesome.”

In addition to Ratledge and Burke, the Uganda study’s co-authors are Gabriel Cadamuro, a senior machine learning engineer at Atlas AI, a predictive analytics firm co-founded by Burke, Lobell, and Ermon. pay attention; Brandon de la Cuesta, an associate researcher at the King’s Center for Global Development and a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and at the Center for Food Security and the Environment ; and Matthieu Stigler, a former Stanford Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Food Security and the Environment, now a Research Fellow at ETH Zurich.

More information:
Marshall Burke, Using machine learning to assess the livelihood impact of electricity access, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05322-8. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05322-8

quote: Research opens a ‘new frontier’ in tackling global poverty (2022, 16 November) accessed 16 November 2022 from https://techxplore.com/news/2022-11- ushers-frontier-tackling-global-poverty.html

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