Week in review

Hello, glad you could join us for the Wikiprogress week in review - a handful of headlines that have caught our eyes over the last week. You can find all news articles and blog posts on the progress community in the Wikiprogress Community Portal.    

Big data

Can a country's online "mood" predict unemployment spikes? (SAS News 12.03.2012)

SAS and UN Global Pulse have analysed over two years of social media data to learn that the ‘mood’ created by conversations held on these platforms can predict increases in unemployment. Around half a million blogs, forums and news sites were used in the study, one of many in the new movement to use ‘Big Data’ for human development.

Affect our social media mood and ‘like’ our Wikiprogress Facebook page

Education

Pass the books. Hold the oil. (New York Times 11.03.2012)

The latest results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that education is a better economic driver than natural resources; students in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having high PISA scores and few natural resources.

See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on PISA

Japan one year on

Remembering and learning from Fukushima (UNDP 12.03.2012)

This week marked the one year anniversary of the major earthquake that struck off Japan's north-eastern coast, causing a devastating tsunami. This UNDP post explores the lessons the world needs to learn from the disaster and the importance of disaster risk reduction systems. 

See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on progress in Japan

Gender equality

Alert! Arab world women at bottom of global workforce participation (World Bank Blog 08.03.2012)

While significant progress in the MENA region is being made to close gender gaps in education and healthcare, many of the investments in human development are not equating to increased rates of female participation in economic and social life. The region has the world’s lowest labour force participation: at 25 percent it is half the world’s average.

See more and contribute to the Wikigender progress series article on achieving societal progress through increasing women’s employment opportunities

Spotlight: Putting inequality in the post 2015 picture

We hope you will tune in the same time next week. In the meantime, if anything interesting passes your desk that you would like to see in the next Wikiprogress week in review, please tweet it to us @Wikiprogress or post it on our Facebook page.

Yours in Progress,

Philippa Lysaght

Kids in High Poverty Communities: 5 Ways it Affects us all

Success should be in the grasp of all children, no matter where they live.  However, the opportunities available to children based on their neighborhood vary dramatically across the United States.  For the 8 million U.S. children living in high-poverty neighborhoods  critical resources for their healthy growth and development-including high-performing schools, quality medical care and safe outdoor spaces-are often out of reach. The KIDS COUNT project at the Annie E. Casey Foundation  tracks the well-being of children and families in the United States and provides information for data-based advocacy. This means being the go-to place for data on children and families and we do that by partnering with local child advocacy organizations to track data  on children at the national, state, and local levels.  

Most recently, we looked at new data available at the community-level and found five major data points that highlight the wide reach of high-poverty areas and the impact it has on us all.

1.     There are more children than ever living in high-poverty areas. Nearly 8 million U.S. children live in high-poverty areas – about 1.6 million more since 2000, a 25 percent increase.

2.     Eleven percent of the nation’s children are growing up in areas where at least 30 percent of residents live below the federal poverty level – about $22,000/yr for a family of four.

3.     Nearly all states saw the number of children in high-poverty neighborhoods climb over the last decade. States with the highest rates were Mississippi (23 percent), New Mexico (20 percent), and Louisiana (18 percent). 

4.     Among the 50 largest U.S. cities, Detroit (67 percent), Cleveland (57 percent), and Miami (49 percent) had the highest rates. 

5.     Research shows that children who grow up in high-poverty neighborhoods are at much greater risk for health and developmental challenges in almost every aspect of their lives, from education to their chances for economic success as adults.  These challenges exist regardless of their own family’s income.

The prosperity of communities across the country depends on their ability to foster the health and well-being of the next generation. A number of approaches can improve the chances of success for families in high-poverty communities, making these areas better places to raise children, help families secure jobs, access services beyond their neighborhoods, and enable them to move to neighborhoods with better opportunities if they desire.  We included some of the most promising policies and practices in our report.

The latest KIDS COUNT Data Snapshot on Children Living in America’s High Poverty Communities is available, along with data on our data center for the states and the 50 largest cities. Visit the data center to get this and much more data on children and families where you live.

About the author: Laura Speer is the Associate Director for Policy Reform and Data at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore Maryland, USA.  The Annie E. Casey Foundation is a private, charitable foundation dedicated to helping build better futures for disadvantaged children in the United States. 

Inequality post 2015

This post was written by Claire Melamed from the Overseas Development Institute.

It’s just under 1400 days until the end of 2015 – the date which marks the expiry of the Millennium Development Goals. These goals, agreed in 2000, have for the last 12 years provided a globally agreed framework for defining and measuring progress on global poverty. One testament to their success is that the debate about what should follow them is now in full swing.

This debate is a chance to re-evaluate what is meant by progress, and to consider what’s been learnt since 2000 about how to measure it. One of the themes that keeps coming up is the question of how that progress is distributed within societies. There’s a strong desire for a new global framework to have more to say about inequality.

This is partly because of a growing social and political concern for inequality across the world. The impact of the financial crisis and resulting government spending cuts across Europe is shining a spotlight on how the pain from the crisis is distributed – who pays the price and who does not. It’s clear that across whole societies, the richest are bearing little of the burden, while the poorest are suffering most from cuts in government spending and economic instability.

At the same time, in India, China and other fast-growing countries there is increasing concern that growing inequalities threaten both poverty reduction, as inequality reduces the impact of economic growth on poverty reduction,and political stability. While these countries have seen astonishing growth rates and reductions in poverty in recent years, increased inequality threatens both. The example of Brazil and other Latin American countries shows that inequality can be tackled – a number of countries have seen falls in inequality in recent years, falls which are mostly the result of government policy choices rather than market forces.

The MDGs don't have much to say about inequality. The targets are all about averages. The target for income poverty, for example, is to halve it by 2015. For maternal mortality, it is to bring it down by three-quarters. The halving of income poverty, or the reduction of maternal mortality, is of course a tremendous achievement. But the people not reached are unlikely to be randomly distributed within a society – they will be the people most excluded by ethnicity, geography, race or gender. The MDGs don’t provide the incentives for governments to find out who is left behind, or to design special policies to reach them.

How could a new framework be designed to provide better incentives for governments to measure and tackle inequality? A recent ODI paper summarises current proposals, and considers the pros and cons of each. There are two broad choices.

One way is to include measures which focus on inequality across whole societies. A target for the Gini coefficient of income, for example, would encourage governments to measure income inequality and think about how to reduce it. Or, more broadly, targets which give progress on social indicators in the bottom income quintiles a higher ‘weight’ than progress in higher income quintiles would give governments points for both reaching the very poorest and tackling inequality across the board.

A second set of proposals focuses less on measuring inequality for its own sake, and more on providing incentives to ensure that the poorest are not left behind by progress. Specific targets for progress in the bottom twenty per cent is one idea, or universal targets which would mean that leaving behind particular groups would jeopardise achievement. Both of these would focus on bringing the poorest up to a minimum standard, but would not have much to say about inequality across the whole society – which could well be rising at the same time.

Reaching an agreement will involve forming some sort of consensus on what is the bigger political priority – tackling inequality for its own sake (the more ambitious project), or focusing on the gap between the poorest and the rest. Of course, the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and the ideal might be an agreement which combined the two, possibly to different degrees depending on the country concerned. But they have different implications for governments, for the technical issues involved in the measurement of progress, and for the groups whose role is to hold governments to account for the promises they make.

The debate about what comes after the MDG’s can’t just be a technical debate between measurement experts. It’s got to be a political one too – about what kind of societies we want to live in, and about how to get there. Building in a focus on inequality is very firmly at the heart of that debate.

UNESCO World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education: A call to action

Twenty years ago, a young girl starting school in sub-Saharan Africa could expect to receive about five years of education during her entire life – and part of that time might have been spent repeating grades. Today, she could expect to spend about eight years in a classroom although the boy sitting next to her would likely benefit from an extra 18 months of instruction. This remarkable yet uneven progress comes to life in a new atlas on gender and education, released by UNESCO on International Women’s Day.

The World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education comprises about 120 maps, charts and tables featuring a wide range of sex-disaggregated data and gender indicators produced by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. The Atlas enables readers to visualize the educational pathways of girls and boys in terms of access, participation and progression from pre-primary to tertiary education. It also illustrates the extent to which gender disparities in education have changed since 1970 and are shaped by factors such as national wealth, geographic location, investment in education and fields of study.

Though the “growth in girls’ enrolment in primary education clearly demonstrates the successful mobilization towards Education for All movement, we must reinforce this movement if we are going to reach the most vulnerable girls and women who continue to be denied their right to education,” said UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova. “We must attack the root causes of this discrimination and target our interventions. For example, the data clearly show that a girl who starts school late has a very high risk of dropping out. The Atlas serves as a roadmap to bring about real change in the lives and opportunities of male and female students globally.”

Globally, girls have been the first to benefit from the tremendous efforts made to achieve universal primary education, especially since 1990. Two-thirds of countries have achieved gender parity at the primary level but access to secondary education remains a challenge for girls in many countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia. However, girls who do make the transition tend to persist and perform better in their studies than boys. As a result, there has been a significant rise in women’s participation in tertiary education, especially in high-income countries where female students outnumber male students. Yet as highlighted in the Atlas, these gains do not necessarily translate into better opportunities for women in terms of employment or income. 

To illustrate these patterns, the Atlas presents the school-life expectancy (SLE) of different regions and countries from a gender perspective. In this case, school-life expectancy reflects the average number of years of instruction that a boy or a girl entering the school system can expect to receive. It is important to note that a child can spend part of this time repeating grades.

The greatest progress in reducing the gender gap in SLE has been made in South and West Asia, where a girl can expect to receive 9.5 years of education compared to almost six years in 1990. However, boys continue to have the advantage, with an average SLE of 10.5 years. A similar situation is found in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab States, where girls who start school are now likely to spend eight and 10 years, respectively, in a classroom. Nevertheless, boys in both regions still have the advantage with at least one extra year of instruction. It is also important to note high repetition rates in many countries can diminish the impact of these gains in school-life expectancy. 

In East Asia and the Pacific, school-life expectancy for girls increased by 38%  between 1990 and 2009. Consequently, a girl enrolled in primary education can now expect to spend about 12 years in school, which slightly surpasses the male average. This is also the case in Latin America and the Caribbean, where a girl starting primary school can expect to receive almost 14 years of instruction compared to 13.3 years for boys.

“These data reflect the commitment of governments and the international community to close the gender gap in education. But there is a tremendous difference between gender parity gender equality. There may be equal numbers of boys and girls in the classroom but to what extent are both groups encouraged – or discouraged – to pursue their education and potential? To better understand what girls and boys are learning in the classrooms, UNESCO is developing new ways to measure the quality of education and the learning outcomes of all students, with a specific focus on gender equality.”

The print edition of the atlas, is available in English, French and Spanish, and will be accompanied – as of mid-May 2012 - by an online data mapping tool that enables users to track trends over time, adapt the maps and export the data. This eAtlas will be regularly updated with the latest available data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. 

For more information on the World Atlas, please contact:  Lydia Ruprecht, Education Research and Foresight Team, Knowledge Management Services, UNESCO.

More on gender equality at UNESCO .

Week in review

Hello, glad you could join us for the Wikiprogress week in review - a handful of headlines that have caught our eyes over the last week. You can find all news articles and blog posts on the progress community in the Wikiprogress Community Portal.    

Happy International Women’s Day!

On Thursday the 8^th of March the world celebrated International Women’s Day with thousands of events highlighting the economic, political and social achievements of women. The theme for 2012 is connecting girls and inspiring futures. Our sister wiki, Wikigender, is one of the many ICT tools that are connecting girls and women across the globe and developing knowledge and understanding on key gender issues.

Read highlights from the Wikigender online discussion: How can access to ICTs promote opportunities for women and girls?

On Gallup well-being

Why College Towns Are Also the Happiest, Healthiest Towns (The Atlantic 06.03.2012)

College towns have toped the list of the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index with relatively high incomes, levels of colleague graduates and a diverse range of workers- all of which are associated with happiness and well-being at the metro level.

See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on progress in the United States

On the environment

Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation (UNICEF/WHO 07.02.2012)

UNICEF and WHO have jointly released the 2012 update of the Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation report. The report has found that an estimated 780 million still lacked safe drinking water in 2010, and the world is unlikely to meet the MDG sanitation target. 

See highlights and download the report Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation

On data

G8 Digital Shoot (On Earth 22.02.2012)

Our data trails could prove to be a treasure trove of digital information; while alone this data might seem to be meaningless, this article argues that if it is properly minded it could provide invaluable insights into human behaviour.

Interested in big data? Tweet us your ideas @Wikiprogress #BigData

On graffiti in Kenya

Nairobi’s graffiti revolution (VOH 07.03.2012)

In the lead up to the general election, anonymous street artists in Kenya have taken to the walls to protest against corrupt politicians and to encourage residents to choose leaders who put the nations’ interests before their own agenda.

See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on civic engagement

Report release:

Life Beyond Growth: Alternatives and Complements to GDP-Measured Growth as a Framing Concept for Social Progress, Institute for Studies in Happiness, Economy, and Society

We hope you will tune in the same time next week. In the meantime, if anything interesting passes your desk that you would like to see in the next Wikiprogress week in review, please tweet it to us @Wikiprogress or post it on our Facebook page.

Yours in Progress,

Philippa Lysaght

At CSW56, discriminatory social institutions matter!

Happy Women's Day!

Last week, Executive Director of UN Women, Michelle Bachelet, opened the 56^th UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the largest gathering of the gender community, with the following call to action:

“We need to remove discriminatory practices and laws. Women need equal rights and access to land, inheritance, and property. As one rural woman said, “When the land is in my husband’s name, I’m only a worker. When it is in my name, I have some position in society.”

Right from the start, it was clear that discriminatory laws, social norms and practices – what we refer to as discriminatory social institutions – were squarely on the agenda.

In line with this year’s CSW theme, the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges, the OECD Development Centre – together with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and the Government of Kenya – organised a side event on Empowering women through the transformation of discriminatory social institutions. We presented the findings from our research paper “Do discriminatory social institutions matter for food security?” We found that countries where women have equal rights to access land produced around three times more annual cereal yields in 2009, compared to countries where women have no or few rights to access land. Three fantastic panellists addressed the question of “what works” to change discriminatory social institutions, providing innovative examples including using a legal empowerment model in Rwanda to secure women’s land rights, popular education in Zambia to shift discriminatory attitudes and constitutional reform in Kenya. During the discussion, participants raised issues such as divorce rights and inheritance issues, especially when it comes to land; land rights in matrilineal communities; informing the CEDAW Committee on access to justice; and one participant from Uganda highlighted the usefulness of the Social Institutions and Gender Index framework to be used at country level as a powerful advocacy tool.

Across the various sessions of CSW, we repeatedly heard the concepts “social norms”, “discrimination” or “harmful practices”, reinforcing the powerful, albeit invisible, role of social institutions in undermining gender equality. I attended a session on “Rural girls and urban migration: the role of communications for development in bridging the divide”, where one of the panellists referred to a survey in Addis Ababa that found out that 1 in 4 girls in Ethiopia came to the city to escape child marriage or abuse at home. In another similar session on “Harnessing C4D Innovations: Transforming the lives of marginalised girls through ICTs”, UNICEF introduced “U report”, a free sms-based system allowing young Ugandans to speak out about issues affecting them and work together with community leaders to enable positive change: again, one of the recurring issues mentioned by young girls was child marriage. The need for better data to capture discriminatory social institutions such as violence against women and women’s access to resources was raised at a joint session on data and evidence organised by UN Women and UN Statistics Division, which we also attended.

Yesterday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon reiterated the urgent need to address discrimination against women in his International Women’s Day remarks, using research from the OECD Development Centre:

“Discriminatory laws and practices affect not just women but entire communities and nations. Countries where women lack land ownership rights or access to credit have significantly more malnourished children.”

Not only is it encouraging to see global leaders finally recognise the need to change discriminatory social institutions to empower women, but it is also evident from our side event that there are many inspiring programmes and initiatives that are delivering change on the ground. We hope that this momentum on discriminatory social institutions gained at CSW will continue and translate into real actions by international organisations, donors, governments and civil society – our experience at CSW tells us that lasting change is possible. We have the evidence. There are solutions. It’s time to make it happen!

Estelle and Somali from the Gender Team at the OECD Development Centre