To increase awareness and promote usage of geographic information system applications in development strategies, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network and the World Bank have produced "Where the Poor Are: An Atlas of Poverty," a series of maps detailing spatially referenced data on hunger, child mortality, income poverty and other related indicators at the global, regional, national and local scales.

The maps included in "Where the Poor Are" show how advances in data collection and technology can be used to put poverty-related indicators into meaningful visual context. The book includes maps on the global and continental distribution of infant mortality and hunger, the distribution of resource inequality in five sub-Saharan countries, and poverty rates in Viet Nam, Nicaragua and Bolivia, to name just a few. As per Marc Levy, Associate Director for Science Applications at CIESIN, these maps and data sets help broaden the understanding of the relationship between poverty and geography--beyond the more common urban-rural framework. "The revolutionary advances in poverty mapping have made it possible to be precise about things we used to only generalize about," says Levy. "Connections between poverty and climatic conditions, soil fertility, exposure to natural disasters, access to transportation networks, and other important drivers, are beginning to come into sharp relief".

Maps can be practical instruments that provide a foundation by which efforts to tackle the root cases of poverty can be made more efficient and effective. Still, few decision makers have fully realized the potential of maps to enhance poverty-reduction and infrastructure investment strategies at various levels. In 2005, the United Nations Millennium Project Huger Task Force commissioned two maps--one on the spatial distribution of child malnutrition and the other on hunger, both of which are included in the Atlas--showing subnational data on these factors. These maps were critical in developing a framework of recommendations for the Task Force on ending hunger, and helped guide the selection of the first villages involved in the Millennium Villages Project, an initiative to scale-up an end to poverty in rural communities.

Experts at CIESIN and the World Bank hope that the Atlas will raise awareness of poverty maps' potential, and inspire further progress in their development and use. "This Atlas marks a milestone in an ongoing process," said Shaida Badiee, Director of the World Bank's Development Data Group. "We are just beginning to discover the a number of innovative ways poverty mapping can be used to design, monitor and evaluate development programs".


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