Nowcasting for hunger relief: a study of promise and perils

Wayne Wobcke, Caroline Compton, Fleur Johns, Jayson Lamchek and Siti Mariyah

Information Technology for Development, 2023, vol. 29, issue 1, 27-47

Abstract: Pitched as an aid to better development decision-making, the website HungerMap LIVE presents composite data on, and machine-learning-derived predictions of, food insecurity in 90 countries. Of its current version, this article asks the following questions: What work is HungerMap LIVE called upon to do in ICT for development (ICT4D) practice? How well is it set up to do that work? Combining technical (both computer science and statistical) and social analysis, this article employs a close reading method drawn from humanities and legal research not usually directed at digital platforms or websites in combination with interview-based techniques. By this means, it scrutinizes HungerMap LIVE’s potential to guide or mislead users and canvasses some elaborations that could enhance its usability. It argues that interdisciplinary research of this kind can counter both the historical and technological determinism troubling the ICT4D field and better position decision-makers to employ machine learning in history- and context-attentive ways.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02681102.2022.2092438 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:titdxx:v:29:y:2023:i:1:p:27-47

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/titd20

DOI: 10.1080/02681102.2022.2092438

Access Statistics for this article

Information Technology for Development is currently edited by Sajda Qureshi

More articles in Information Technology for Development from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().