Comments

Hi Joseph, could you clarify on the new normal life, especially for workers traveling on buses and other vehicles to work. The Covid control measures from the office of controller that would be great.. Thank you.

Great Article Kim … things will pass and your business will once again soar to greater heights !

And thanks also to Ryan for sharing the UNICEF data and agree with you that accessibility, use ability and applicability of data to particular country and community contexts is necessary in order to make the data valuable.

Hi David, thanks for sharing information about the Pacific Data Hub for the Blog readers and agree access to timely data is a critical part of any research activity. It will be great to see this Hub used more and more by researchers, decision-makers and communities in the Pacific. Thanks again, Keren

The motive is to investigate the important question of whether hunger is widespread in PNG. There is a nutritional problem in PNG, but there is also evidence, in this blog and other surveys, that hunger is widespread.

I agree with you

This is so fantastic Justin! Many, many thanks for pushing this vital agenda forward to generate the first global resolution! There are so many dedicated people worldwide who tire of powerful lifesaving knowledge being repeatedly ignored or fobbed off by national governments. So being United for the first time, now that is a very BIG LOUD VOICE!

Excellent points, David. And nice to hear from you again. 100 percent agree and nice to hear about the shifting demand. Hopefully this also shifts the culture around data-sharing and quantitative research too, which may in turn finally encourage a bit more of it! One further point I would add, salient in pandemic times, is that by opening up these datasets to anyone in the world, great people will come and work for free! Encouraging the best researchers around the world to turn their attention to the region will only increase the calibre of the work done and the policy dialogue and is something we have been behind on for far too long. Further to what you mention on the great work you have been doing on PDH, I'd also flag to readers that the UNICEF MICS surveys are rapidly adding Pacific countries, the PNG 2016-18 DHS is easy to access through the DHS platform, and there is some neat historical census data for some Pacific countries on IPUMS International. As you mention, getting the HIES and other poverty and labour related products up somewhere as easy to access as these websites is a next important frontier, as is getting finer spatial identifiers in these ones.

Thank you David, that is very useful to know. Terence

The only other data that might be of some use is that gathered by RAM (Rotary Against Malaria) I believe they do household surveys in the provinces/districts where they distribute bed nets. I am no statistician but it might be worth having a conversation with them. I live in Western Highlands Province and have seen some of the data for this province.

Whilst I agree with what this morning's authors say about the need for a change in approach to research in the region, it is a shame that they do not give any attention to one of the fundamental weaknesses in the research process - the difficulty of accessing the necessary data. We at SPC have been building the Pacific Data Hub (PDH) (see https://pacificdata.org/) to be a central source of Pacific data for the region, containing a microdata library (accessible through a data licencing process) and a development indicator database for the SDGs and a wide range of other key indicators derived from census, surveys and administrative data (see https://sdd.spc.int/indicators-stat). A key to the success of this endeavour is encouraging national statistical authorities as well as government ministries and other agencies to make their data available through the PDH or their national websites, where necessary in a secure and managed way, to researchers be they national or international, who wish to use it for the greater good. The COVID pandemic has acted as something of a catalyst in this regard as the demand for data has increased substantially, particularly around the need for information for social protection and poverty alleviation, as the economic slowdown in many Pacific countries has impacted livelihoods and families. Without access to a wider range of timely and reliable data Pacific researchers will continue to be hindered whatever approach is followed.

The authors seem to have attempted to take one lone statistic from the PNG national statistical database and inflated it into a pseudo-scientific study that lacks credibility. I am not sure what is behind the motives but from experience there is usually a corporate interest involved. I do not know what that might be in this instance. I guess many people would ask, is there a nutritional problem rather than a hunger problem? Certainly some 48 years ago balanced nutrition was the bigger problem.