Sulawesi - GIS

Put simply, a “poverty map” is a map that contains information on where the poor live. It can capture the heterogeneity of poverty within a country (or region). A poverty map can reveal the variation in local poverty levels and can therefore show a large degree of local heterogeneity at the province, district, sub-district, or village level in seemingly homogeneous regions.

As a result, if poverty maps are available, they can be used to improve the targeting of intervention. This means that resources can be used more effectively in designing poverty reduction programs. If the neediest groups can be more accurately targeted, it will reduce the leakage of benefits from poverty reduction programs to non-poor people, and it will also reduce the risk that poor people will be excluded from programs.

Why Poverty Maps ?

Poverty maps provide a geographical picture of poverty. They stratify poverty data from different topographical or administrative areas and then allocate patterns on a base map so that spatial differences become more visible.

Poverty maps are useful for obtaining general overviews and for undertaking or confirming general targeting. However, they may also disguise local differences by averaging data across large areas. For most project design purposes, poverty maps should use data from the county level or lower, which may be available from agency databases, statistical yearbooks, censuses, etc.

Such detailed poverty maps covering small administrative areas help address the shortcomings of aggregate poverty profiles in many ways. Poverty analysis is often based on national level indicators that are compared over time or across countries. The broad trends that can be identified using aggregate information are useful for evaluating and monitoring the overall performance of a country. For many policy and research applications, however, the information that can be extracted from aggregate indicators is not sufficient. This is because they are unable to show significant local variations in living conditions within countries.

Poverty maps of small administrative areas can greatly enhance and sharpen poverty analysis.

• Small-area poverty maps can reveal the variations in local poverty levels. Most countries in the world have regions that are better off and others that lag behind. Such differences are often obscured in national statistics – a problem that is particularly critical in large and heterogeneous countries such as Indonesia

• Poverty maps can improve intervention targeting, so that resources can be used more effectively. Poverty maps can help reduce the risk of program benefits leaking to non-poor households. Similarly, they can reduce the risk of under-coverage – the risk that poor households will be missed by a program.

• Poverty maps can help governments to state their policy goals more objectively. Basing allocation decisions on empirical geographical poverty data, rather than subjective regional ranking, increases the transparency and credibility of government decision-making. Poverty maps can therefore help limit the influence of special interests in allocation decisions. This is particularly relevant in the context of a highly decentralized country such as Indonesia is currently. By increasing transparency, poverty maps can help prevent a regional autonomy policy from being hijacked by local elites.

• Poverty maps can become an important tool for local empowerment and decentralization. Disaggregated information on human welfare and other locally relevant information is useful not only to governments and decision-makers, but also to local communities. Poverty maps therefore provide local stakeholders with the facts needed both for local decision-making and for negotiations with government agencies.

• Poverty maps are useful tools for evaluating the impact of interventions. In addition, poverty maps open up more opportunities to undertake detailed empirical research on the causal relationships between local poverty, income inequality, and various other social outcomes, both at the individual and the community levels.

• Quantifying small-area indicators of poverty allows their incorporation into geographical information systems (GIS). This feature of poverty maps facilitates the combination of poverty information with other indicators from policy-relevant subject areas. Examples are geographical databases of transport infrastructure, public service centers, access to input and output markets, or information on the quality of natural resources.

Using geographical overlay techniques and spatial analysis methods, poverty databases constructed in this way can be used to address a range of multidisciplinary questions. The databases can also be used by the private sector to guide them in determining the locations for new investment opportunities.

Poverty maps can also reveal the variation of welfare across a given area. The higher the resolution of the map, the greater the variation that is revealed.

The maps can provide rapid information on the spatial distribution of poverty. Analysts are beginning to produce poverty maps with a finer resolution, by geo-referencing surveys and integrating the data with other information. Linking poverty assessments to maps also provides new benefits in addition to the applications outlined above:

Poverty maps make it easier to integrate data from various sources such as surveys, censuses, and satellites, and from different disciplines such as social, economic, and environmental data. This can help in defining and describing poverty. For example, by comparing spatial patterns of income with educational level, access to services, and market integration, different dimensions of human well-being can be examined or even integrated.

A spatial framework allows switching to new units of analysis, for example from administrative boundaries to ecological boundaries, and allows access to new variables like community characteristics, not collected in the original survey.

Identifying spatial patterns with poverty maps can provide new insights into the causes of poverty. They can help answer such questions as the extent to which physical isolation and poor agro-ecological endowments constitute impediments to escaping from poverty. This in turn affects the type of interventions to consider.

The allocation of resources can be improved. Poverty maps can assist in the best locations and methods for anti-poverty programs. Geographical targeting, as opposed to across-the-board subsidies, has been shown to be effective at maximizing the coverage of the poor while minimizing leakage to the non-poor (Baker and Grosh, 1995). Research examining highly focused geographical targeting at the community level is currently being conducted in Burkina Faso. Using appropriate scaling and robust poverty indicators, poverty maps can assist in the implementation of anti-poverty programs, for example by promoting subsidies in poor communities and cost recovery in less poor areas.

Poverty maps with a high resolution can support efforts to decentralize and localize decision making. Maps are a powerful tool for visualizing spatial relationships and can be very effective in reaching policy makers, thus providing an additional return on investments in survey data, which often remain unused and unanalysed after the initial report or study is completed.

Internationally comparable poverty maps applying a consistent set of indicators at sub-national level can improve the decision-making and strategic planning of international development organizations that have previously had to rely mostly on national indicators.

Most national poverty assessments based on household and community surveys have compiled data that permit disaggregation into broad categories such as urban and rural areas, socio-economic characteristics such as household types and educational backgrounds, and major geographical regions such as a coastal, forest, and savannah zones. These poverty assessments have helped in:

1. defining poverty;

2. describing the situation and problem;

3. identifying and understanding causes of poverty;

4. developing programs and formulating policies, and

5. selecting interventions and guiding the allocation of resources.

References:

Henninger, Norbert; “Mapping And Geographic Analysis Of Human Welfare And Poverty ----- Review And Assessment”, Washington, D.C., USA, World Resources Institute, April 1998

Suryahadi, Asep et al., Developing a Poverty Map for Indonesia (A Tool for Better Targeting in Poverty Reduction and Social Protection Programs) Book1: Technical Report., Jakarta, SMERU, February 2005

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