Mapping and poverty (Blog Action Day 2008)

The 2008 theme for Blog Action Day is Poverty, a subject that hasn't been out of the papers in one form or another for a long time.

I thought I'd start with a fairly obvious Google image search for "poverty map". Geographic.org appears to come up trumps with the fairly straightforward World Poverty Map (2000) in its collection.


Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps used with permission.

On the surface this appears self-explanatory but on closer inspection it is confusing, even misleading, that the white areas are labelled in the key as "No Data".

This doesn't really help provide a true picture of the world situation given the amount of white space on the map.

A more colourful, and complex, representation of the world's financial state is provided by the Helsinki University of Technology's Self Organizing Map (SOM). 39 quality of life indicators (from 1992) were used to compare countries and graphically align countries with similar characteristics.

In colour coded form it looks like this:-



And in more conventional map form it looks like this:-



There were plenty of other images returned via Google but nothing that really offered me anything of interest or made me feel that I was learning anything new.

Then I came across www.povertymap.net, a website aimed at "Promoting the use of poverty maps in policy making and targeting assistance, particularly in the areas of food security and environmental management."

Unfortunately the section that used to contain selected examples of poverty maps has been removed as the site owners have "not been satisfied with the quality of the entries, nor the technical implementation of the database." If nothing else it is refreshing to see this level of integrity on the web.

Something quite different is the London School of Economics' Charles Booth Online Archive which offers a fascinating insight into poverty mapping in the 19th Century.

The Maps Descriptive of London Poverty are perhaps the most distinctive product of Charles Booth's Inquiry into Life and Labour in London (1886-1903). An early example of social cartography, each street is coloured to indicate the income and social class of its inhabitants.

The lowest classification level, A, is indicated by the colour black on the map and is described in detail as:

The lowest class which consists of some occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals. Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink

Poverty has always existed. There will always be a range of wealth and quality of life within any population group, however big or small. In this sense there will always be poverty, there will always be some people less well off than others.

But gaining a better understanding of the situation, educating all of us about the cause and effect of poverty, and encouraging more people to look for ways to narrow the gap, to help those less fortunate, is becoming increasingly important in the world today.

Improving access to the underlying data and finding much better methods of visualising this information might just help this education process... maybe, just maybe, mapping can play a role.

There are plenty more poverty maps on the web, here are just a selection of my recommended links for further reading:-

• The World Bank guide to poverty mapping.
• The Global Poverty Mapping Project.
• More on Charles Booth.
• Rural Poverty Portal - World Poverty Map.
• UNICEF - The State of the World's Children 2005.
• BBC News - Child Poverty in the UK.