You are here: Home » 0 » » Archives for 0st

Fragility & Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa: Two Sides of the Same Coin

A South Sudanese soldier carries a machine gun. Credit: punghi/ Shutterstock

By Samuel Kofi Tetteh Baah and Christoph Lakner
WASHINGTON DC, Aug 17 2023 – In 1990, about half of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and two-thirds in East Asia and the Pacific were living in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than what today amounts to around $2.15 per person per day).

In the three decades that followed, these three regions have followed quite different development paths. In 2019, 35 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa were estimated to be living in extreme poverty, compared to 9 percent in South Asia or 1 percent in East Asia and the Pacific.

Why has Sub-Saharan Africa been left behind? What explains the sluggish progress in poverty reduction in the region?

The role of fragility, conflict, and violence in stifling development

Fragility, conflict, and violence, or, more generally, the lack of peace and security, is one of the key barriers to poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The World Bank’s list of fragile, conflict-affected, and violent (FCV) countries in 1998, the year with the earliest available data, indicates that 13 of the 24 FCV countries worldwide were in Sub-Saharan Africa (54%, or slightly over a half).

By 2021, the year with the latest available data, the number of FCV countries in Sub-Saharan Africa had increased by six, and the region still accounted for roughly half of all FCV countries in the world (19 of the 37 FCV countries).

Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the world had already become more violent over the years, largely driven by increasing counts of FCV countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa.

These two regions do not only have the most cases of fragility, conflict, and violence, but also the worst trends in extreme poverty.

Thirty out of the 48 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (almost two-thirds) have been designated as a fragile, conflict-affected, or violent (FCV) country at least once since 1998; in the Middle East and North Africa, it is 7 out of 14 countries (or a half).

Extreme poverty has decreased at a slow pace in Sub-Saharan Africa and increasing in the Middle East and North Africa (though at lower levels of poverty and subject to greater uncertainty due to a lack of recent data for many countries in the Middle East).

Besides the severe impact on human life and happiness, conflicts worsen a country’s ability to promote its own development and eradicate poverty. They lead to the loss of lives (human capital) and property (physical capital), thereby stifling investment, growth, and poverty reduction.

From an economic standpoint, they destroy investor confidence in the economy and lead to wasteful military spending. Conflicts destabilize economic activity, disrupt food value chains, and increase the risk of food insecurity and hunger.

In times of political or civil unrest, people flee for safety in neighboring countries, human mobility and transportation can be restricted, trust and social capital get destroyed, and people live in fear and panic with little or no hope for a better life.

All these factors are contrary to the values of freedom, peace, and stability necessary for poverty reduction.

Poverty and fragility: a vicious circle

The lack of peace increases the risk of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. All FCV countries in the region in 1998 were low-income countries, whereas the non-FCV countries were split between middle-income and low-income countries.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, the Central Africa Republic, and Liberia are highly conflict-affected, and are the only countries that have remained FCV countries without interruptions since 1998.

These four low-income countries had an average extreme poverty rate as high as 73 percent in 1998, while the remaining FCV countries had an average rate of 44 percent compared with 56 percent for all non-FCV low-income countries.

In 2019, the abovementioned four countries still had a high extreme poverty rate of 58 percent, almost twice the extreme poverty rate in the remaining FCV countries or all non-FCV low-income countries (34 percent and 39 percent, respectively).

Fragility and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa

Or could it be that the lack of peace in Sub-Saharan Africa is because of poverty (and inequality) in the region? Studies have suggested that grievance increases the risk of conflict, and grievance may occur when individuals or groups of individuals are socially, politically, or culturally deprived.

Conflicts are more likely when deprivation occurs along the lines of ethnicity, religion, or geographical location. In fact, high ethnic and cultural diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa increases the proclivity for such conflicts.

A negative relationship between income status and FCV status, supports the idea that poverty drives conflicts. On the other hand, it is important to stress that this is not an automatic mechanism: eight countries have always been low-income countries but were not FCV countries in 2019.

Also, two of them (Rwanda and Uganda) have never been FCV over the entire period for which data are available. Overall, poverty and fragility can re-inforce each other and create a vicious cycle or a trap.

There are other factors that might jointly explain the high levels of poverty and fragility in Sub-Saharan Africa, such as low schooling attainment, high inequality in educational outcomes, and the lack of decent jobs. Improving educational outcomes for all (i.e., SDG 4) and increasing job opportunities for all (i.e., SDG 8) would therefore be priority areas in Sub-Saharan Africa that could potentially break the poverty-fragility trap that the region seems to be stuck in.

A highly educated population is more likely to be tolerant, while education and employment opportunities offer the most likely route out of poverty. However, these policy actions are more long-term in perspective, and require peace and stability to be effective.

Samuel Kofi Tetteh Baah is Consultant, Poverty and Inequality Unit, Development Economics Research Group, World Bank; Christoph Lakner is Senior Economist, Development Data Group, World Bank.

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the UK Government through the Data and Evidence for Tackling Extreme Poverty (DEEP) Research Program.

Source: World Bank

IPS UN Bureau

 


!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);  

Artificial Intelligence Faces Charges of Left-Wing Political Bias

Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 17 2023 – The artificial intelligence (AI) platform ChatGPT, whose negative consequences include misinformation, is facing new charges of political bias.

According to a study by the University of East Anglia (UEA), released August 17, AI ChatGPT shows “a significant and systemic left-wing bias”.

Published in the journal Public Choice, the findings show that ChatGPT’s responses favour the Democrats in the US, the Labour Party in the UK, and President Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party in Brazil.

Concerns of an inbuilt political bias in ChatGPT have been raised previously but this is the first largescale study using a consistent, evidenced-based analysis, say a team of researchers in the UK and Brazil, who developed a rigorous new method to check for political bias.

Lead author Dr Fabio Motoki, of Norwich Business School at the University of East Anglia, said: “With the growing use by the public of AI-powered systems to find out facts and create new content, it is important that the output of popular platforms such as ChatGPT is as impartial as possible”.

“The presence of political bias can influence user views and has potential implications for political and electoral processes.”

“Our findings reinforce concerns that AI systems could replicate, or even amplify, existing challenges posed by the Internet and social media.”

Asked if it was possible to avoid or circumvent the political bias in ChatGPT, Dr Motoki told IPS: “Our study does not directly address this issue. What you ask is a recent and active area of research. What we do create is a method to systematically measure bias by leveraging the ability of these more advanced models of answering questions in a human-like fashion, while statistically overcoming some issues around their randomness.”

The main contribution of the study, he pointed out, is addressing several standing issues in the AI bias literature with a simple procedure.

“We posit that our tool is a way of democratizing the oversight of these models, acting as a guide to measure their biases and hold their creators accountable”.

“I can’t go into details because of a non-disclosure agreement, but an entity (I cannot say whether a government agency or a private company) has asked me to produce a technical report using this method. Therefore, we expect it to have a real-world impact, helping address your concern of avoiding bias,” he said.

According to the study, the researchers developed an innovative new method to test for ChatGPT’s political neutrality.

The platform was asked to impersonate individuals from across the political spectrum while answering a series of more than 60 ideological questions.

The responses were then compared with the platform’s default answers to the same set of questions – allowing the researchers to measure the degree to which ChatGPT’s responses were associated with a particular political stance.

To overcome difficulties caused by the inherent randomness of ‘large language models’ that power AI platforms such as ChatGPT, each question was asked 100 times and the different responses collected.

These multiple responses were then put through a 1000-repetition ‘bootstrap’ (a method of re-sampling the original data) to further increase the reliability of the inferences drawn from the generated text, according to the study.

“We created this procedure because conducting a single round of testing is not enough,” said co-author Victor Rodrigues. “Due to the model’s randomness, even when impersonating a Democrat, sometimes ChatGPT answers would lean towards the right of the political spectrum.”

A number of further tests were undertaken to ensure the method was as rigorous as possible. In a ‘dose-response test’ ChatGPT was asked to impersonate radical political positions.

In a ‘placebo test,’ it was asked politically-neutral questions. And in a ‘profession-politics alignment test’ it was asked to impersonate different types of professionals.

“We hope that our method will aid scrutiny and regulation of these rapidly developing technologies,” said co-author Dr Pinho Neto. “By enabling the detection and correction of LLM biases, we aim to promote transparency, accountability, and public trust in this technology,” he added.

The unique new analysis tool created by the project would be freely available and relatively simple for members of the public to use, thereby “democratising oversight,” said Dr Motoki.

As well as checking for political bias, the tool can be used to measure other types of biases in ChatGPT’s responses.

According to the UEA study, while the research project did not set out to determine the reasons for the political bias, the findings did point towards two potential sources.

The first was the training dataset – which may have biases within it, or added to it by the human developers, which the developers’ ‘cleaning’ procedure had failed to remove.

The second potential source was the algorithm itself, which may be amplifying existing biases in the training data.

Besides Dr Motoki, other researchers included Dr Valdemar Pinho Neto (EPGE Brazilian School of Economics and Finance – FGV EPGE, and Center for Empirical Studies in Economics – FGV CESE), and Victor Rodrigues (Nova Educação).

Meanwhile, citing a report from the Center for AI Safety, the New York Times reported May 31 that a group of over 350 AI industry leaders warned that artificial intelligence poses a growing new danger to humanity –and should be considered a “societal risk on a par with pandemics and nuclear wars”.

“We must take those warnings seriously,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last June. “Our proposed Global Digital Compact, New Agenda for Peace, and Accord on the global governance of AI, will offer multilateral solutions based on human rights,” Guterres said.

“But the advent of generative AI must not distract us from the damage digital technology is already doing to our world. The proliferation of hate and lies in the digital space is causing grave global harm – now. It is fueling conflict, death and destruction – now. It is threatening democracy and human rights – now. It is undermining public health and climate action – now,” he warned.

Guterres also said the UN is developing “a Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms” — ahead of the UN Summit of the Future scheduled to take place in September 2024.

“The Code of Conduct will be a set of principles that we hope governments, digital platforms and other stakeholders will implement voluntarily,” he told reporters.

A copy of the study is available via the following Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/dsfdvc77xdaumuau74ry1/h?rlkey=0mu6cr88ax8fdrj8k1k174741&dl=0

The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a UK Top 25 university (Complete University Guide and HESA Graduate Outcomes Survey) and is ranked in the UK Top 30 in the Sunday Times and Guardian University guides. It also ranks in the UK Top 20 for research quality (Times Higher Education REF2021 Analysis) and the UK Top 10 for impact on Sustainable Development Goals.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 


!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);