The Equality Insights team at the International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) developed Equality Insights Rapid, a tool to enable individual-level, gender-sensitive measurement of multidimensional poverty via a phone survey, in the context of COVID-19. A variant of an existing longer face-to-face survey, Equality Insights Rapid assesses 15 dimensions of life including environment, plus assets to assess financial status. Demographic questions enable disaggregation of data by gender, age, disability status and location (urban/rural). Primary data collection enables analysis of correlations between the Environment dimension and other dimensions, including Water, Shelter, Sanitation and Time-use. This Working Paper outlines the relevance of Equality Insights to the landscape of data on gender and environment. It describes the rationale for including the environment as a dimension of multidimensional poverty and how it is assessed, briefly documenting the evolution in approach over time and presenting examples of resulting insights. The Working Paper introduces the Equality Insights Rapid survey implemented in Tonga in 2022, some four months after the eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano and associated tsunami. The approach to assessing environment as a dimension of multidimensional deprivation via a phone survey is outlined and initial results presented, illustrating the types of environmental insights that can be generated. Reflections are offered regarding the analysis that is possible given the scope of the data set and its contribution to the gender and environment data landscape.
# The Equality Insights Rapid Tonga Survey 2022 results shared in this paper are preliminary. The final results are expected to appear on the websites of Equality Insights and the Tonga Statistics Department in June 2023.
* Prepared by Joanne Crawford and Megan Carroll with contributions from Gayatri Ramnath.