Adaptive Safety Nets for Rural Africa : Drought-Sensitive Targeting with Sparse Data
This paper combines remote-sensed data and individual child, mother, and household-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys for 5 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to design a prototype drought-contingent targeting framework for use in scar...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/448401596001667053/Adaptive-Safety-Nets-for-Rural-Africa-Drought-Sensitive-Targeting-with-Sparse-Data http://hdl.handle.net/10986/34301 |
| Summary: | This paper combines remote-sensed data
and individual child, mother, and household-level data from
the Demographic and Health Surveys for 5 countries in
Sub-Saharan Africa to design a prototype drought-contingent
targeting framework for use in scarce-data contexts. To
accomplish this, the paper: (i) develops simple and
easy-to-communicate measures of drought shocks; (ii) shows
that droughts have a large impact on child stunting in these
five countries, comparable, in size, to the effects of
mother’s illiteracy or a fall to a lower wealth quintile;
and (iii) shows that, in this context, decision trees and
regressions predict stunting as accurately as complex
machine learning methods that are not interpretable.2 Taken
together, the analysis lends support to the idea that a
data-driven approach may contribute to the design of a
transparent and easy-to-use drought-contingent targeting framework |
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