Using big data to consolidate results of poverty alleviation

Stressing the important role of big data in establishing and perfecting the country’s long-term mechanism for consolidating antipoverty achievements, the top authorities recently issued a guideline document saying the country will set up a big data platform to strengthen data sharing and docking among relevant departments to facilitate data comparison and information sharing, in order to prevent people from falling back into poverty.

It is fair to say that data have played an increasingly important role in promoting exchanges between urban and rural residents and improving social governance. According to statistics, China had 989 million internet users by December 2020, with the internet penetration rate reaching 70.4 percent. Fiber optic connections have been offered to 98 percent of poverty-stricken villages, and e-commerce has reached all of the 832 poverty-stricken counties in rural areas.

In the process of China’s poverty alleviation endeavor, relevant parties have attached great importance to the use of big data to carry out information registration, data updating and service monitoring, and this has played an important role in helping the country achieve its overall victory in the battle against poverty.

China should now give full play to big data in consolidating the achievements of poverty alleviation by solving the “data island” problem.

Many localities and departments have established various data and information platforms, but due to administrative barriers and other problems, most of them are isolated and not used for data sharing. This has not only increased the work for departments at various levels and wasted governance resources, but also intensified the information asymmetry between higher and lower levels of governments and different departments, thus affecting the accuracy and precision of data on the poverty alleviation achievements.

This highlights the need for the country to facilitate the sharing of data to fully realize the potential of big data in consolidating the achievements of poverty alleviation. Local governments should collect the relevant data and information from different departments and build large databases of consolidated poverty alleviation data in provincial-level administrative regions.

In this process, the key is unified planning and unified standards so as to enable cross-regional and cross-departmental information exchanges.