Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

FAO and partners have co-organized a series of Innovation Zoominars addressing the role of innovation and digital technologies in increasing resilience of smallholders to emerging disruptive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural livelihoods.

This Zoominar session will be part of ITU-UNESCO Regional Digital Inclusion Week for the Arab States, focusing on challenges facing the innovation processes in the agriculture sector with regards to governance and public policy aspects. The session will involve all partners and government representatives from the NENA Region and will emphasize on accelerating the development of innovation and digital agriculture in agri-food systems in the countries.

The discussion will examine the role that FAO and partners could play in facilitating the implementation and scalability of such innovations in the NENA region and guiding governments towards a robust policy plan of action to avoid the worst consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the agriculture sector and food security.

Join the Zoominar on Thursday, 12 November 2020 at 13:00 – 15:00 (UTC+2).

You can access the full agenda and further details of the Zoominar here.

Please find the registration link here.

The FAO Technical Network on Poverty Analysis (Think-PA) is pleased to invite you to the webinar "Behind the scenes of a global poverty number and the challenges of rural estimates"

Wednesday, June 17 |15:00-16:30|

Please register here. You will receive an e-mail with the link to webinar

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” (watch the video recording here), 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.

For more information on the Think-PA please click here

To join the Think-PA, please send an e-mail to [email protected]

Tuesday, 24 March - 14:00 - 15:30 CET

Even though there is a large consensus that it is an individual condition, poverty is usually measured using household aggregated data. At the same time, social policies in developing countries, including food security and nutrition interventions, often try to reach deprived individuals by targeting poor households. However, differently from what standard poverty measures assume, there is often substantial inequality in the distribution of resources within households. The consequence is that poverty reduction policies might be fail to identify the households where most deprived individuals live and/orreach those deprived individuals 

within their households.

In this webinar, Caitlin Brown will address the issue of intra-household inequality in the context of poverty measurement. She will discuss the challenges of identifying intra-household inequality as well as the consequences that accounting for it might have on current poverty numbers. Her presentation will provide an overview of the existing empirical evidence on intra-household inequality in nutritional outcomes, caloric intake, resource shares as well as discrimination against certain household members.  Finally, it will analyse the implications for targeting rural poverty reduction policies.

Agenda:

• Introduction by Erdgin Mane, Policy Officer, FAO
• Presentation by Caitlin Brown, Assistant Professor, Central European University
• Open Discussion

To take part register here

To join the Think-PA, please send an e-mail to: [email protected].

Organized by the Technical Network on Poverty Analysis (Think-PA)