Mapping Poverty Improves People’s Lives in Kenya

Seventy-five percent of the world’s poor live in often ignored and neglected rural areas. National systems for education and health care, for example, don’t always reach the most needy. In many cases, national governments do not clearly know where their poor populations reside. WRI’s poverty maps are providing governments with powerful visual information about where the poor live and where their federal resources are being spent. With these maps, governments can see the problems and better direct scarce financial resources to where they are needed most. Kenya’s Constituency Development Fund was created in early 2005 to channel development funds to the grassroots level through locally-based initiatives. Relying on poverty maps that WRI helped create, a Poverty Index has been developed by the Kenyan government to ensure that funds are guided to areas that will have immediate gains for the poor.