ADB teamed up with the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) for a virtual challenge to crowdsource digital solutions for Asia and the Pacific economies reeling from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Winners of the first two events presented their solutions to the questions of how to track the pandemic impacts in real-time and how to use technology to give smaller firms access to finance.

Attendees engaged with the winning teams and learned how hackathons can be used to generate ideas to tackle major development problems and see ways to link diverse datasets to accurately nowcast key economic variables such as GDP and inflation. They also examined the accuracy of these models in times of financial crisis for a range of countries, explored how store owners and their vendors’ supply chain data could be used to de-risk working capital loans, and discovered how monitoring microentrepreneurs’ inventory repurchases can be used as an early warning of credit defaults.

(Part 7 of the Asian Impact: ADB Research in Action webinar series)