Data Visualization

Blog of the Data Visualization & Communication Course at OSB-AUB

This is my favorite part about analytics: Taking boring flat data and bringing it to life through visualization” John Tukey

Food Insecurity: Children in Lebanon

by | Nov 22, 2022 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

With the current economic situatation, the Lebanese GDP had decrease from around $50 billion in 2018 o around $20 Billion in 2021. Further, the Lebanese pound had lost around 85% of its value. These two factors together resulted in a significant reduction in consumers purchasing power, which in turn has worsen the food insecurity situation in Lebanon.

One of the indicators used by UN to assess the criticalness of the food insecurity in a country is the percentage of population that are facing undernourishment. Ideally, the percentage should be zero (as part of UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals). As we can see in the graph below, starting 2012, the percentage have been growing fast comparing to the world rank that was decreasing. Further, the percentage was very high compared to North American and Europe. Unfortunately, due to the economic crisis, we notice that the percentage became around 11%, which is even higher than the world rate.

Another indicator is the percentage of population facing severe food insecurity, which means do not have access to enough food. As we can see in the graph below, the percentage had grown from around 4% in 2018 to around 10% of the population in 2020, which is 10 times higher than the percentage of people in North American, and almost 6 times greater than the percentage of people in Europe.

According to Unicef, Children are among the most who are suffering because of this. according to Unicef survey, 53% of Lebanese children had to skip 1 meal a day, 90% of children do not meet the standards for minimum meal frequency, and around 7% of children were found to be stunted.

The goal tp solve this is part of UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals as part of the second goal: End hunger, and it adresses it through 3 key pillars:

2.1 By 2030, ensure access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food.

2.2 By 2030, end all forms of malnutrition, including achieving agreed targets on stunting and wasting in children under 5 years of age.

2.3 By 2030, double the agricultural productivity

This can be achieved by building a sustainable and resilient agriculture sector. To achieve that two things are needed.

First, we need to enhance productivity in the agriculture sector. this can be done through using advanced sensing and analytics. For example, sensors can be used to gather a wide range of data points (e.g., weather, land yield, production output) to manage in real time, and take optimized soltutions.

Second, we need to manage quality, and optimize operations. This can be done through microsegmentation of farms. For example, today, Software solutions can identify areas with a below-average yield and help adjust fertilizing and watering accordingly.

To ensure the solution will work, we will take Ethiopia as a case study. Ethiopia had performed a similar transformative strategy, according to Mckinsey & Company, and which was by the company as a benchmark for Lebanon. In the Last graph, we can see that clearly that the agriculture sector had grown from around 4 to 20B in 2013 after the strategies were implemented.

However, implementing these strategies is not possible without government intervention especially due to the high investment needed for similar technologies to be used. Therefore, the Lebanese government should invest to promote these technologies, and it also promote this ideology among farmers, and train them, for this strategy to succeed.

 

 

 

 

 

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