“Poverty assessment methods powered by algorithms are supposed to make payments fairer, but activists and researchers say such tools often wrongly exclude people,” writes Reuters in a story on new tools to benefit social protection.
Sikandra Kurdi, a researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which was hired by the World Bank to conduct technical assessments of its anti-poverty programs, said algorithmic tools are a reasonable option for countries that cannot afford universal social protection.
“Once you agree that you cannot catch everybody and you have to make some decisions about targeting, then PMT is a fair way to do it,” she said, adding that policymakers should be aware that it is not a “technocratic magic bullet.”
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Republished by multiple media outlets including Devdiscourse, Malaysia Now, and L’Orient (Lebanon).