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Friday, September 29, 2006
Poverty Maps
A news item from the Earth Institute at Columbia University:
To increase awareness and promote usage of GIS-based 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 Vietnam, Nicaragua and Bolivia, to name just a few.
The excellent website at www.ciesin.org/povmap/index.html includes the maps, data sets as Excel files, and other information. As I post this, the maps seem to be down but keep an eye out for them. Judging from the sample map from the Earth Institute link (the image below) these will be very cool to look at (until you realize what you're looking at, of course. Then depression ensues). Very useful information for people doing poverty-related or other applied research.
Posted by Will at September 29, 2006 12:33 PM in Anthropology