Poverty Research
Nobel Prize Winner for Economics in 2019, Abhijeet Banerjee’s innovative, data-driven, approach to tackling the causes of poverty has been a huge inspiration for Calcutta Rescue.
This had led to analysing the specific health needs of individual communities to decide how to deploy the charity’s two mobile health teams most effectively, and in 2019, carrying out a major survey of poverty in 22 slums where it works.
The survey which took six months and involved almost 1,000 interviews – will allow the charity to properly understand the issues driving poverty in each community and make decisions about how best to assist them which are rooted in hard data, not just instinct and experience.
While CR does not have the resources to carry out the randomised control techniques used by Prof Banerjee, CR is gathering more and more data on the people it serves to better understand their problems. Initial results of poverty survey has been incredibly useful to us. We now have a better understanding of each slum community’s needs (and each slum has different needs), we can better allocate resources and we can better measure our impact.