On on 17 June from 15:00 - 16:30 CET, the FAO Technical Network on Poverty Analysis (Think-PA) is organising a webinar titled “Behind the scenes of a global poverty number and the challenges of rural estimates”.

To register for the webinar, click here. 

Overview:
The first target of the SDGs is to eradicate extreme poverty, currently measured as people living on less than $1.90 a day. The World Bank estimated that, in 2015, 734 million people lived in extreme poverty worldwide and, of these, about 80 percent lived in rural areas. Not surprisingly, the share of rural inhabitants in developing countries that live in extreme poverty is almost three times higher than the share of those living in urban areas.  What is behind the estimation of these apparently straightforward numbers? How are the figures related to rural poverty calculated? And what could be improved?

In this webinar, R. Andrés Castañeda Aguilar will explain how the World Bank estimates global poverty, highlighting the main methodological challenges of using the current approach for rural areas. Finally, he will discuss potential ways to improve global rural poverty estimates, using an example from Latin America to illustrate their implications.

This webinar looks in greater detail into some of the issues introduced during the last Think-PA webinar on “Estimating the impact of COVID-19 on rural poverty”, with a more systematic focus on the methodological challenges to estimating global rural poverty.

Agenda: 

• Introduction by Katia Covarrubias, Economist, FAO
• Presentation by R. Andrés Castañeda Aguilar, Economist/Data Scientist, World Bank
• Comment by José Rosero Moncayo, Director of the FAO Statistics Division
• Open discussion

Guest speakers’ bio:
Raul Andrés Castañeda Aguilar is an Economist/Data Scientist in the Data Group of the Department of Development Economics at the World Bank, where, during the last ten years, he has conducted socioeconomic analysis in topics related to poverty, welfare distribution, and inequality of opportunities. He is interested in the analysis of data for policy dialog, statistical and methodological research, and the development of computational tools for socioeconomic analysis. He holds a Master of Science in Economics from the University of Rosario, Colombia and a Master of Arts in Apologetics from the Biola University, USA.

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