OVERVIEW | Ethiopia - Economic Monitoring

[Holly-Transport]

Client Contact Name(s)

Nistha Sinha, EAEPV (East Africa Poverty Team)

Project Charge Code

2095528

Project Manager

Dunstan Matekenya

Project Sharepoint URL

https://worldbankgroup.sharepoint.com/:f:/r/teams/DevelopmentDataPartnershipCommunity-WBGroup/Shared%20Documents/Projects/Data%20Lab/Ethiopia%20Reform%20Monitoring%20Program?csf=1&web=1&e=1hR8pR

Project Web Book URL

http://worldbank.github.io/ethiopia-economic-monitoring/

Project Assignment

FY25 Work Plan: https://worldbankgroup.sharepoint.com/:w:/r/teams/DevelopmentDataPartnershipCommunity-WBGroup/Shared%20Documents/Projects/Data%20Lab/Ethiopia%20Reform%20Monitoring%20Program/Documents/FY25%20Ethiopia%20Poverty%20Monitoring%20Work%20Plan.docx?d=w75d256d325854a82becb293f2bc58302&csf=1&web=1&e=Kn14Zu

The following tasks have been agreed upon for the first round of deliverables:

• Base maps
• Climate Indicators - Urban Air Pollution Index
• Production - Productivity Trends in Cropland Areas
• Needs Assessment - Premise Crowdsourced Survey
• Needs Assessment - Google Trends Analytics

Timeline

October 2nd - First meeting to ask questions
October 16th - First Deliverable

Partnership Proposal

link

• Plume Labs
• Premise
• Google Trends

Minutes

Clarification meeting, October 3

• Damage assessment project specific to critical infrastructure

Internet connectivity

• Timeline: Before the war, April, 2023 up to now
• Spatial: locality level (ADM2, ADM3)

COnflict

• Aggregation at ADM2

Agriculture

[SahitiSarva]

Setup a meeting for 17th September. The team is interested in Urban Air Pollution and Google Trends for now but has more questions they want to discuss.

[SahitiSarva]

Minutes from 17th Sep Check-In

They're doing a phone survey. They're not getting economic activity data officially before January.

1. Google Trends -- currency devaluation, events like the Somaliland, announcements about Somalia and Egypt, internal conflict related events -- both in English and Amharic,
2. Urban Air Pollution Index
   Proxy economic activity. The other angle is also the exposure to conflict of these locations. Most of the manufacturing plants are around Adis Ababa. 2021 Tigre war, what are the effects of events that happened then. Road networks are very important to bring goods into Ethiopia. Check air pollution along road networks.
3. Conflict analysis. The team does not have subnational GDP. Outside urban areas there is very little electricity, it is mainly solar
4. Base Maps: Get the household survey maps from the team. The last poverty map is old but they can look to see if they have an updated one.

Questions

1. How are we organized - initial analysis followed by updates till December -- April 2024
2. Air Pollution - connection to economic activity
3. Training and handover of the data
4. Do we have Google Places API so they can get Points of Interest data -- can we get a subscription model.

I. Time period for the data analysis -
Air Pollution: 2019-today -- changes over time.
Google Trends: 2024 beginning to now
Conflict analysis: 2019 to now

II. Timeline for the project
Do both pieces of analysis between now and December. First deliverable by Annual meetings (mid October).

[SahitiSarva]

Minutes from the 2nd October Check-In

Points of Interest --
From Data Lab:
What is the quality of PoIs?
OSM, Overture Maps. Quality you can see it from two dimensions - geographic coverage, richness.

They expect a certain correlation between air pollution and economic activity. Which are the points where we should be looking at the data for?
Kenya to Ethiopia road, Djibouti-Addis corridor.

1. Air Pollution indicators by city and town
2. Air pollution along road corridors: Monthly in 2019-2024. They expect to see some sensitivity between the fact that people are importing and exporting less. Just for the last 6 months, can we go more granular.

Hypothesis: In the Tigres region, the pollution data should reflect the decline in economic activity since 2021.

Google Trends:

1. What is the exchange rate? Value for a dollar? Search terms related to job searches, migrating to the US, when does the US embassy open? Visa
2. What are people searching for? Use broad terms and see if there are similar topics and queries people are searching for.

The team to share the shapefiles from the household surveys

[dmatekenya]

Minutes from October-21 Check-in

Basemaps

• How is a locality different from other places?

Pollution

• Nistha will provide exact location of the major road corridors
• Comparing 2022 and 2024: Compare regular days (e.g., February), just check to make sure there is nothing happening with the data itself
• Explore and ask local people about some of the trends seen in the data (e.g., spike in pollution in 2021)
• Expand the air pollution to the rest of the country

Google Trends

• Keep focusing on devaluation and financial information
• Conflict - No need to explore this further
• Explore relationship between search terms and topics
• Also, focus on prices (e.g., price of gold)
• Another topic is shortage of dollars
• Focus terms: Forex, devaluation, prices (assets, fuel); disaster;
• Focus on associations across topics, search terms
• For people from outside, see if its possible to find remittance related terms
• Nistha

Premise

Next Steps

• Updated deadline. November 5th
• Next Check-in . Setup a meeting before 11/5/2024

[SahitiSarva]

Notes from 7th November 2024 call

Google Trends

• Striking that there is a peak close to the policy announcement.
• One of the concerns the govt has is to see if people will interact with the financial instruments formally or informally (blackmarket)

Action Items @gauravcusp

• They want a similar line figure for searches outside of Ethiopia (USA)
• Add internet penetration map (get data from Ookla for Good) and add it to the book
• Combine PowerBI dashboard into the web-book.

Action items @SahitiSarva

• Add NTL data
• Share the Air Pollution notebooks

[SahitiSarva]

Minutes from March 10th call -

Actions items on @Nistha Sinha and @Kristina Noelle Vaughan -

• Confirm comparative cities for which we can look at Night lights and Air Pollution trends - Nairobi for Addis
• Identify regions where manufacturing activity is high so we can zoom in on air pollution statistics in that area -
• Insights on the change in mining activity especially in 2024.
• Share data on electricity tariffs with me so we can plot the nightlights with this together.
• Share the web-book with energy colleagues to get insights on night light trends.

Action items on @Sahiti Sarva -

• Start off with Nairobi as a comparative city for Air Pollution and nighttime lights
• Add conflict analysis maps from ACLED to see trends with conflict.
• Complete nighttime lights analysis.
• Add granular analysis for the manufacturing regions