WRI’s initiative to help produce poverty maps in East Africa—notably Uganda and Kenya—is paying off with a rapid expansion in the demand for such maps.
The initiative began in 2002 with the WRI and UNEP/Grid-Arendal publication of Where are the Poor? Experiences with the Development and Use of Poverty Maps. This report presented an approach called small-area estimation, for developing these maps. Poverty maps are being used in poverty reduction strategies to target investments for the most needy, to allocate funds in emergencies and famines, to redistribute revenues at provincial and municipal levels, to control disease outbreaks, and even to improve tax collection.
Over the past three years we have helped to build a partnership on poverty mapping for East Africa. Partners include the International Livestock Research Institute, the International Food Policy Research Institute, the World Bank, the African Economic Research Consortium, and national organizations (the bureaus of statistics in Kenya and Uganda).
In October 2003, the Government of Kenya released reliable, high-resolution poverty data for 2,070 rural Locations and 496 urban Locations. Past poverty data covered only Kenya’s 63 Districts. The Uganda Bureau of Statistics released similar maps in October 2004. These new maps provide—for the first time—poverty indicators for 149 rural “counties” and 171 urban “sub-counties”, which are much more detailed than previous maps. Estimates for 1992 and 1999 allow changes in poverty levels to be examined.
In March 2003, six months after the release of Where are the Poor, 10 countries had completed poverty maps based on small-area estimation techniques. A year later, 20 countries had completed new high-resolution maps and 8 countries were planning to do so.
WRI has increased the supply of sub-national poverty maps and moved one step closer to regional and global maps showing the incidence of poverty at sub-national scales. Together with the World Bank and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), WRI compiled sub-national indicators of poverty and human well-being for about 50 developing countries and made this information available in one location (EarthTrends Poverty Resource: http://earthtrends.wri.org/povlinks/index.cfm).
Over the past year, WRI has brought together an alliance of institutions and individuals to investigate the spatial relationships between poverty and ecosystem services in Kenya. The resulting maps, to be published in 2005, will support poverty reduction strategies that better integrate ecosystem, governance, and poverty considerations.
