Geunhee Lee

Food Security of low-income elderly in Seoul

The impact of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) radically reshaped how people interact and exist.

In particular, with the practice of physical distancing, we all had to adjust to the new normal where people could only be virtually connected. Although the impact of COVID-19 is so enormous that people have been affected in every way, the suffering from the virus is not equal. To be specific, this rapid transformation has shed a light on the pre-existing inequality with particular attention to one age group — the elderly. In particular, senior citizens who have a higher mortality rate from the infection of coronavirus, thus have higher limitations on movement for everyday life tasks such as shopping or going to community centers. This constraint calls for the urgent attention of our society on those undernourished neighbors who are exposed to higher food insecurity risk.

The project explores the food security issue as not merely a logistical issue in a crisis, but also as an unequal distribution of resources. After closing many of the places that previously supported underfed people, such as soup kitchens for senior and homeless people, undernourished people are facing food insecurity threats. To address the senior population within this context is particularly important, not only because the elderly population is the most vulnerable group to infectious diseases, but also they are highly likely not to be free to move due to health and are not familiar with accessing digital information that may help them.

Continuous reports on temporary closing of soup kitchens and local community centers that provided free meals for low-income neighborhoods prove that the infection spread and physical distancing worsened the food security of the vulnerable population. Emergency funding for free meal facilities was also invested at the national level, but very little data about which regions and groups are exposed to higher risk by the crisis is available. By bringing this information together as a form of a dataset with preliminary research findings, the present project aims to envision solving social problems with civic participation through data-driven problem awareness.

Process

Background

Source: YNA | Image credit: Asiae

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Project Scope

The study investigates the unequal impact of COVID-19 on food security issues of the low-income elderly population in Seoul, South Korea.

Although South Korea has been regarded as a country not critically vulnerable to food insecurity, underlying risk factors related to food security of low-income elderly--such as a high poverty rate of senior citizens--raise questions about the impact of coronavirus on their food security. To investigate this question, this study selected Seoul as an area of interest of study and set the period of interest before the pandemic (2019) and after the pandemic (2020).

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Research Questions

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What specific changes, before and after the pandemic, are evident in the budget allocation, population and ratio of low-income senior citizens, and number of facilities and recipients of free meal service?
What do the changes in access, provision, and use of free meal service imply regarding food security of low-income senior citizens in Seoul?
What would be the qualitative changes that have not been seen in the data? For example, how does the group of interest describe changes to their daily food sources?

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Methods

Data Collection

The study used three main datasets: the volume of the elderly population and income level of the elderly, budget allocation and expense for free meal service for the elderly, and free meal service facilities in Seoul. All datasets used in the project were collected through the internet between mid-September to mid-October of 2020. For consistency of project scope, the target range of datasets was set from January to December 2019 for pre-covid data observation, and January to December 2020 for post-covid observation.

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Data Analysis

The data analysis was divided into quantitative and qualitative analyses. For the quantitative analysis, data collected went through the process of sorting to have year and district variables that can be used as key variables to merge various datasets. After combining datasets, visualization were created to identify the overall trend. For the qualitative analysis, requests through open information web portal and phone call interviews with free meal service managers of free meal service facilities were conducted.

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Findings

By comparing the summary of datasets from 2019 and 2020, the research questions of observing the impact of COVID-19 were addressed.

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Finding 1. Rapidly increased low-income senior population that exceeded the budget allocation increase

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Overall, the budget allocation for free meal service has been increased after the pandemic. The total budget allocation in 2020 was approximately $25 million which was $1.9 million higher compared to the last year. However, the increase was shown even more dramatically in the low-income population, with an increase of low-income senior citizens population about 20,000 in 2020.

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The average budget allocation has increased compared to 2019. The average budget allocation of 216 free meal support facilities in Seoul also increased.

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However, the number of low-income elderly has increased even more.

As a result, the capacity to serve food security of low-income elderly might have been negatively impacted by COVID-19, despite the budget increase. For example, the percentage of free meal service recipients among low-income elderly decreased.

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Finding 2. Amplified Regional Gap — North and South

Another finding from datasets was about regional differences in terms of resource distribution. To be specific, although the low-income senior population has increased in all 25 districts post covid, northern Seoul had a higher low-income elderly population than northern Seoul. This difference was observed from both datasets of 2019 and 2020 (Graph 2). For example, Seocho-gu, which is known to be one of the wealthiest districts in Seoul, had the lowest ratio of low-income elderly with approximately 0.5 % both in 2020 and in 2019. However, Seocho-gu had a higher budget per free meal service and per free meal facility and recipient in 2019 and 2020 than the average.

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The total elderly population is higher in southern Seoul, but the low-income elderly population is higher in northern Seoul.

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Visualization and Index

I created a dataset, interactive visualization, and index using Tableau to compare food security by districts.

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Low-income Elderly Population

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Low-income Elderly Population - Visualization (Korean) →

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Budget allocation

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Budget allocation - Visualization (Korean) →

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Free meal facility locations

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Free meal facility locations - Visualization (Korean) →

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WAF Index

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WAF Index -Visualization (Korean) →

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Conclusion

The study defined the decrease in the percentage of free meal service recipients among low-income elderly as a negative change (Graph 7 and Table 3), since it could imply that the outreach of the service to the elderly in need improved. However, the opinion from each district and interviews with facility managers that were conducted as qualitative research implied that the increase also could have led to lowering the quality of service due to lack of allocated resources. Therefore, future studies require a reconsideration of how this can be interpreted in comparison to the actual capacity of the facility.

The future plan of the study can be categorized into 3 tasks. First, obtaining an updated dataset to include private free meal service facilities and detailed operation status are expected. Second, developing a food security index from the most relevant conditions of each district (e.g., budget, low-income elderly population, nutrition condition of the elderly, accessibility to the facilities, public transportation option, etc. ) can be achieved through further data analysis. Third, the dataset and preliminary analysis as major outcomes of the study is expected to be released to the public to call for attention to this issue and invite more citizens to be involved.

Finally, there are two potential planning implementations of the project. First, the project could provide a way of piloting that recognizes and shares social problems by collecting and publishing open data online that anyone can access and reuse, led by citizens. Empowering citizens to lead open data management, encompassing the entire lifecycle of open data, will also shed a light on the role and responsibility of civic hacking, especially with a concentration on social issues such as open data ethics for the vulnerable populations in an emergency crisis. Second, the project can be considered as an example of exploring the limitations and potentials of the digital transformation of public services, especially for those who have been identified as vulnerable in the digital divide, and what are the next steps can be considered to overcome the limitations with a collaboration of the public sector and civic sector.