Poverty and Ecosystem Services in East Africa

The poverty and ecosystem services mapping project aims to overcome three major barriers to sustaining ecosystem services and creating economic opportunities for poverty reduction:

• Lack of relevant information on the connection between ecosystem services and human well-being;
• Narrow focus of institutions on their mandates making it difficult to work across sectors and professional, geographic, and political boundaries;
• Limited use of poverty-ecosystem services information in policy formulation and development debates.

The project builds on established partnerships in East Africa that seek to influence the implementation of poverty reduction strategies and change environmental reporting by developing geospatial indicators of ecosystem services and poverty. Over the past years, we have:

• Brought together national and international institutions working on poverty, agriculture, biodiversity, water, and other ecosystem services. These include key stakeholders on environmental reporting and implementation of poverty reduction strategies.

• Compiled, shared, and made use of new remote sensing and poverty data in addition to GIS experiences and data holdings built over the past decade by these institutions.