A data-driven overview
At the end of April 2020, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published two ‘data dashboards’ that highlight the huge inequalities that exist worldwide and the resulting disparities in the ability of poorer countries to respond to the pandemic.
For the UNDP and for most commentators, the pandemic is much more than a global health emergency. It is a systemic human development crisis, already affecting the economic and social dimensions of development in a huge variety of fundamental ways. The virus has added another deadly layer of vulnerability to the deep fault lines that have underpinned our dominant model of ‘development’ in recent decades.
For this author’s commentary of these fault lines, see this.
The first data set presented by the UNDP’s Dashboard on Preparedness offers statistics for 189 countries including level of development, inequalities, the capacity of healthcare systems and internet access to explore the existing capacity as well as preparedness to respond to crisis such as COVID-19. The dashboard is colour coded (high, medium and low levels of preparedness) and broken down by region which makes it easy to access and analyse. It graphically highlights the deep fault lines described above.