19^th International CODATA Conference
Category: Economic Development

Geo-Information Needs for Poverty Management

F. O. Akinyemi (bakin_yem@yahoo.com)
Department of Geography, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria

Poverty is a ravaging economic and social phenomenon that is varied in manifestation which reflects the different causes of poverty observable from place to place. To succeed in alleviating poverty, the nature and extent of poverty in a locale has to be determined in order to select strategies that would be best for alleviating poverty there. How best poverty is handled depends on how well facts about the 'who', 'where' and 'why' questions entailed in poverty management are known and understood. That is, finding answers to questions like, Who are the poor? Where are the poor? Why are they poor? Knowing who are the poor is traditionally handled by the use of different econometric (income-based) and anthropometric (welfare indicators) indices which measure income poverty or human poverty. Recent studies which stressed the importance of geography and spatial variables as determinants of poverty have added the flavour of poverty mapping to better understand who the poor are and where the poor are to be found. This makes poverty maps invaluable tools for showing the incidence of poverty as well as enabling the overlay of various poverty indicators in order to understand the spatial dimension and relationships existing between these indicators. Ability to identify distributional patterns of poverty indicators running through each poor household or neighbourhood would help to better understand how to manage poverty. Thus, decision makers are increasingly interested in knowing the geographic distribution of poverty to facilitate the targeting of poverty alleviation programmes especially with the use of geographic targeting techniques. This study addresses the growing requirement for data and information by poverty managers. It identified necessary datasets to be included in a poverty management system to be used as the basis for decision making, planning and poverty problem solving.