The data hungry home

It's said that the pleasure is in the giving, not the receiving. This belief is validated by how humans interact with their family, friends and society as well as their gardens, homes, and pets. Yet for ubiquitous devices, this dynamic is reversed with devices as the donors and owners as the recipients. This paper explores an alternative paradigm where these devices are elevated, becoming members of Data Hungry Homes, allowing us to build relationships with them using the principles that we apply to family, pets or houseplants. These devices are developed to fit into a new concept of the home, can symbiotically interact with us and possess needs and traits that yield unexpected positive or negative outcomes from interacting with them. Such relationships could enrich our lives through our endeavours to “feed” our Data Hungry Homes, possibly leading us to explore new avenues and interactions outside and inside the home

Satellite Earth observation to support sustainable rural development

Traditional survey and census data are not sufficient for measuring poverty and progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Satellite Earth Observation (EO) is a novel data source that has considerable potential to augment data for sustainable rural development. To realise the full potential of EO data as a proxy for socioeconomic conditions, end-users – both expert and non-expert – must be able to make the right decisions about what data to use and how to use it. In this review, we present an outline of what needs to be done to operationalise, and increase confidence in, EO data for sustainable rural development and monitoring the socioeconomic targets of the SDGs. We find that most approaches developed so far operate at a single spatial scale, for a single point in time, and proxy only one socioeconomic metric. Moreover, research has been geographically focused across three main regions: West Africa, East Africa, and the Indian Subcontinent, which underscores a need to conduct research into the utility of EO for monitoring poverty across more regions, to identify transferable EO proxies and methods. A variety of data from different EO platforms have been integrated into such analyses, with Landsat and MODIS datasets proving to be the most utilised to-date. Meanwhile, there is an apparent underutilisation of fusion capabilities with disparate datasets, in terms of (i) other EO datasets such as RADAR data, and (ii) non-traditional datasets such as geospatial population layers. We identify five key areas requiring further development to encourage operational uptake of EO for proxying socioeconomic conditions and conclude by linking these with the technical and implementational challenges identified across the review to make explicit recommendations. This review contributes towards developing transparent data systems to assemble the high-quality data required to monitor socioeconomic conditions across rural spaces at fine temporal and spatial scales

ICT4D external reviews : PAN Americas Corporate Project independent external review; final report

Contents: v. 1, Report; v. 2, Appendice

An Overlooked Market: Loose Cigarettes, Informal Vendors, and Their Implications for Tobacco Taxation

Recent years have seen the development of a substantial literature on tobacco taxation that has both noted its effectiveness as a tobacco control tool, and provided modelling of its implications. However, studies of tobacco taxation and tobacco consumption have largely ignored a crucial aspect of the market for cigarettes in many low- and middle-income countries – the prevalence of loose (single) cigarettes being sold, rather than cigarette packs. We argue that ignoring this market leaves room for unexpected dynamics and unintended policy effects. We develop this argument by establishing four aspects of the market for loose cigarettes. First, we show that it is sizeable and widespread. Second, we note that it has a consumer base that is on average poorer and younger than the overall population of smokers. Third, we show that the price dynamics for loose cigarettes are different to those for packs, that the price for a loose cigarette is typically higher than the equivalent per-cigarette price of a cigarette bought in a pack, and that the price of loose cigarettes and cigarette packs do not always move in parallel. Fourth, based on these dynamics, we show how the features of the loose cigarette market can affect the effectiveness of tobacco control policy, and in particular tobacco taxation. For example, we highlight that insufficient attention to the market for loose cigarettes might lead to a lower than anticipated effect of tax increases on demand, or might result in tax increases not being passed on to the consumers of loose cigarettes at all. Consequently, in order to ensure that tobacco tax increases immediately feed through to all consumers, policymakers in countries with markets for loose cigarettes should prioritise large rather than incremental tax increases

Analysing diet composition and food insecurity by socio-economic status in secondary African cities

This chapter takes as its starting point theorizing around nutrition and food system transitions thought to be increasingly occurring in urban Africa, and how this may be linked to a growing non-communicable disease burden. We focus specifically on the secondary city context by analysing household survey data gathered from six cities across Ghana, Kenya and Uganda during 2013–2015. We asked how diet composition and diversity, food sources and food security varied by socio-economic status, using expenditure and demographic data to create a proxy for household well-being. In this way, we investigate one of the claimed keystones affecting urban food systems and dietary health in sub-Saharan Africa—that of obesogenic urban food environments. Our findings indicate that the socio-economic status of a household was the most important factor influencing household dietary diversity and food security status, i.e. better-off households were more likely to feel food secure and eat from a greater variety of food groups. In addition, the number of income sources was additionally associated with higher dietary diversity. We also found that a household’s involvement in agriculture had only a small positive effect on food security in one city and was associated with a reduction in dietary diversity scores. Our findings emphasize the importance of supporting aggregated national and international statistics on agricultural production and trade with detailed local analyses that focus on actual household food access and consumption. We also see reasons to be cautious about making causal claims regarding consumption change and obesogenic urban environments as the major contributor to a rising obesity and non-communicable disease burden in Africa

Tapping the full potential of the digital revolution for agricultural extension: an emerging innovation agenda

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