Has the World Bank admitted defeat on poverty-targeting?
The World Bank’s competition to develop a tool for poverty-targeting, with a top prize of US$6,000, comes after decades of work and millions of dollars of investment by the World Bank in designing poverty-targeting mechanisms. Many of their staff have dedicated their best years to the task – and yet success has...
The limits of using ‘Big Data’ for development – an economist writes
Get your inner nerd out! The World Bank has launched a competition to help them better predict a households’ poverty status based on easy-to-collect information and machine learning algorithms. Build a statistical model that works well, and you could win a cash price of up to US$ 6,000! So what’s...