Beyond the dashboard: The high cost of fragmented poverty data Ben BrunckhorstMinh Cong NguyenNishant YonzanSotaire Kwizera July 23, 2026 This page in: English

https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/beyond-the-dashboard--the-high-cost-of-fragmented-poverty-data Poverty is multidimensional, but measuring it that way is not easy. Data on some dimensions may not be collected in the first place due to budget constraints, conflict, or other barriers with no immediate solution. Or the data may exist but are fragmented across several datasets that are difficult to combine. For instance, we can estimate the share of low-income households from one dataset, those lacking basic infrastructure from another, and those with low education from a third – yet no single source captures all three dimensions together, making it difficult to know how deprivations overlap. This fragmentation is not just a technical inconvenience, it shapes what governments see, and therefore what they act on. Fragmented data leads to fragmented policies.