How AI Can Help Alleviate Poverty?

Role of AI & ML to help underprivileged come out of poverty

I feel

Nobody on this earth is born to be labeled ‘poor’

But the reality is quite harsh, there are still millions of people on this earth who sleep with a hungry belly every day, not by choice but by force. This is tragic and unacceptable, especially when most of the nation is food sufficient in terms of producing it. Every day many metric- ton of crop being produced is wasted due to poor storage infrastructure and distribution strategy. Cooked foods are thrown into garbage bin without any takers. The actual problem lies with the intent to serve, with the intent to identify such people and reach out to them.

The problem lies in identifying the root cause of the poverty and in identifying the needy one’s

Until as privileged, educated individuals, as a leader of some clout, we are not willing enough to leverage the advanced technology like AI & ML, to identify who are those people who are living in utter poverty and connect with them on the ground, to understand the root cause of them, remaining poor since ages, we will not be able to solve this deeply rooted issue of poverty.

Let’s Look Into Some Stats w.r.t Poverty:

As per wiki:

• We have seen some significant improvement in uplifting the poor population with close to 44 Indians escaping extreme poverty every minute, as per the World Poverty Clock.

source: WPC

As per world population clock :

At the time of writing this article:

• We have 705,139,625, people living in abject poverty all over the world
• Out of total Indian population: 1,382, 151, 808 around 50, 700, 122 are living in abject poverty
• Out of those 50, 700, 122 people in India, 4 % of Females populations are living in extreme poverty, compared to 3 % of the male counterpart.

Around 20, 000 people worldwide on average, as per world population clock are moving out of poverty on a daily basis and around the same 20k no of people are thrown back to extreme poverty every day.

Hunger Stats:

As per FAO,

98 % of the world’s hungry population resides in developing regions. The highest number of malnourished people, 520 million, lives in Asia and the Pacific, in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. Two-thirds live in just seven countries (Bangladesh, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan) and over 40 percent live in China and India.

Around, 821 million people globally do not have enough of the food they need to live an active, healthy life. 1 in every 9 people goes to bed hungry each night, including 20 million people currently at risk of famine in South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria.

The females and girls are most impacted one’s when it comes to hunger and malnourishment, and they account for almost 60–70 % of the hungry population.

If being born as humans we are not able to ensure food security for everyone, it is a serious concern that has to be the top priority list of every nation builder.

Role Of AI & ML In Alleviating Poverty:

It’s very important for every one of us to understand these Sustainability development goals set by the UN.

• No Poverty
• Zero Hunger
• Good Health and Well-being
• Quality Education
• Gender Equality
• Clean Water and Sanitation
• Affordable and Clean Energy
• Decent Work and Economic Growth
• Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
• Reduced Inequality
• Sustainable Cities and Communities
• Responsible Consumption and Production
• Climate Action
• Life Below Water
• Life on Land
• Peace and Justice Strong Institutions
• Partnerships to Achieve the Goal

The number 1 goal for any nation has to be hunger free nation withn no poverty

All these 17 SDGs are interconnected to each other and technology has a very crucial role to play in each of these SDGs to ensure the world is able to meet the same. With this motivation, let’s see what role artificial intelligence has to play

1. Where Does This Poor Section Of People Actually Live?

The government of any nation has to bring technological intervention into their policymaking framework of helping the poor. Their role should not be limited to drafting the policy document, instead, they should take into consideration the real user who is going to be the end beneficiary, they should focus on identifying who are the people in need and where do they actually live.

For the culturally and geographically diverse country like India, it becomes even more important to identify the regions of concerns where there is a lack of infrastructure & resources for the people dwelling there.

Our satellite imageries taken both in daylight and night can be stored & processed by our powerful AI-based deep learning models. These models can use this data to identify the poor and affluent regions using the prowess of the computer vision. The area with bright light in the dark night can signify typically affluent regions compared to that region with absolute or continuous darkness with little or no access to electricity over nighttime periods.

AI can filter out the needy ones based on the region demarcation with the required precision, which can help the government go hyperlocal and have targeted and much-informed strategy to help them. The Social organization involved in poverty alleviation measures can use AI tools to effectively deliver the aids in the right location, helping the real needy people eventually.

“Until you know them you can’t help them. So let AI be your friend in location the needy ones”

2. AI Can Help Deliver Right Education To The Right People At The Right Time

Education To Everyone has to be the biggest driver of poverty and hunger elimination

Artificial intelligence-based learning models can identify the gap in the infrastructure level requirements of schools and colleges in remote areas by processing imageries of the same. This will help the policymakers to measure the reach & impact of their financial spending on this kind of initiative. The loopholes in providing basic infrastructure to the needy ones can be identified earlier using AI models.

Also, AI-based chatbots and robots can now be the virtual teacher imparting tailor-made educational content to the remotest area. The AI teacher will be able to learn from the students and offer a better pathway for teaching and evaluating them. But to make this happen the access to power, the internet, and computers have to be ensured for the poor people who are more often deprived of this kind of educational system.

AI has the ability to understand the need of every learner and modify its ability to deliver the content accordingly, this kind of education, tweaked for the learner living in the poor regions has to be in the top priority list of educators and policymakers.

Fitting one education policy to all will not be effective in the coming future. This has to change and the change will be driven by AI & ML technology for sure

3. AI In Agriculture Can Help Fight Poverty In A Big Way

Agrarian economy of any nation will largely decide how wealthy and healthy that nation actually is ?

Most of the countries who are dwelling the largest population of poor people are agriculture driven economy by its nature and culture, employing more than 50–60 % of their population for their livelihood. Also, the Agri sector happens to be the largest contributor to such a nation’s GDP. So if one has to fight poverty and get rid of hunger it can’t be done without transforming the traditional way of farming.

AI-based technology intervention has to be to implement on the ground to minimize the challenges being faced by the Farming population. Farmers can only maximize their ROI only if they can minimize the loss which they have to bear due to

• Unpredictable weather conditions
• Bad seed quality
• Bad agrochemical quality
• Deteriorating soil conditions
• The Attack of pest and diseases
• Inability to measure the right selling price for their produce
• Inability to sell to the right buyer

AI-based computer vision techniques & Deep learning models are a very effective way to capture Farmland & crop images to help farmer:

• Diagnose any plant-related diseases,
• Analyze Soil quality
• Analyze the impact of chemical
• Recommend the right kind of seeds and medicines for their crop
• Recommend the best pre-production, in-production, and post-production strategies
• Recommend the best crop to produce based on crop cycle and weather conditions

AI & ML based weather advisory & agro advisory services have already been a boon for the farmers helping them plan better, grow more, and earn more.

• Precision & predictive agriculture
• AI-based crop insurance planning
• Crop & soil monitoring
• Supply chain efficiency in Agri sector

All some of the prominent use cases being employed using AI-based deep learning models to help Agri sector reform to its fullest potential and until the nation is willing enough to increase their investment in making agriculture a tech-heavy sector, they will not be able to effectively uplift their largest chunk of the population living in extreme poverty.

4. Healthy Nation Is A True Sign Of A Wealthy Nation

“Smiling nation is a sign of truly wealthy nation”

Good health and well being for all is one of the SDG’s of the UN, which call for the transformative health reform policy based on the given living conditions of the living population. Every nation is made up of people living in different climatic and land conditions. India being the most diverse nation has extreme variations in eating and living habits of its people, which changes in few KM’s itself. So it becomes extremely important for health service providers, policymakers to come up with the hyperlocal strategies to deliver their health services.

AI can help NGOs, health workers, a small and big organization, measuring the impact of their services being delivered and identify the changing needs to come up with better service delivery for the needy one’s

The government involved in drafting a Health-related scheme needs to include AI intelligence to identify the regions with bad health care services and also to identify the actual needy population. Then only they will be able to deploy the schemes with its required efficiency. They need to measure the impact of their old schemes on the ground by leveraging ML technology, then only they will be better prepared in delivering healthcare-related schemes tailor-made for the population segregated in small

• Identifying potential pandemic outbreak (like COVID-19)
• Identifying fake medicines
• Identifying the quality of food being produced
• Identifying latent diseases in the human body and alerting them in advance
• Building intelligent, Preventive healthcare systems

All these and much more are the potential use case where AI will be playing a crucial role to make sure the population of any nation is eating healthy, breathing healthy to be able to act healthy.

No single healthcare policy will be ever effective for the entire population, rich has the different healthcare needs and poor have different, so it’s high time that we are integrating technology and leveraging it’s potential to serve humanity for the larger good.

Summary:

AI has the ability to transform how our natural resources like land, water, air will be used by humanity, to deliver the services which are not discriminatory based on rich and poor, instead, which is revolutionary to deliver custom and tailor-made services based on data-driven intelligence.

So it’s high time that we blessed technologist, people with clout, policymakers, influencers, activist, educationist, intellectuals all come together to leverage the power of Artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, mobile technology, etc, to alleviate poverty from its root cause.