9b Bangladesh poverty mapping

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POVERTY MAPPING AND MONITORING USING IT IS A TOOL TO COMBAT POVERTY : BANGLADESH PERSPECTIVE. BY ABDUR RASHID SIKDER DEPUTY DIRECTOR GENERAL BANGLADESH BUREAU OF STATISTICS COUNTRY PAPER PRESENTED FOR THE EXPERT GROUP MEETING ON POVERTY MAPPING AND MONITORING USING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY BANGKOK, THAILAND, 18-20 AUGUST 2003 ORGANISED BY THE UNITED NATIONS ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMISSION FOR AISA AND THE PACIFIC (UNESCAP).

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POVERTY MAPPING AND MONITORING USING IT IS A TOOL TO COMBAT POVERTY : BANGLADESH PERSPECTIVE. summary Bangladesh is a country of 130 million population with a population density 840/sq.km. Bangladesh economy is not big enough to support such a vast population and high incidence of poverty is the ultimate result. Though the country is making good progress in the socio-economic field in increasing the literacy rate, improving expectation of life, increasing food production and decreasing infant mortality and total fertility but progress of poverty reduction is very slow. Macro-economic growth could not help reducing poverty and income inequality. Now the planners and policy makers suggest to target the poor for poverty alleviation programme implementation. Here the poverty mapping can play vital role to give visual presentation of intensity of poverty incidence by geographic area. This help the planners and policy makers easily detect the most poverty effected area and to allocate more resource to alleviate poverty. Information Technology can be used along with poverty mapping for quick dissemination to the planners and policy makers and thus, poverty monitoring will be strengthen.

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1. Introduction and objective: Poverty has been assigned as the number one problem for development of Bangladesh. Though the country is making significant progress in the socio-economic field, poverty reduction is rather slow. This is mainly because of its high population size of 130 million (population census-2001) in an area of 1,41,000 sq. km. with a population density 840 per sq. km. Every year, about 2 million population are adding to its population size. Country’s resources are struggling to support such increasing population. Bangladesh has already prepared Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (I-PRSP), where top priority has been given to combat poverty with pro-poor planning and development. But, some times, the administrators may be careless or may have difficulty to interpret statistical facts and figures to identify poverty clusters for pro-poor programme implementation. Here comes the role of poverty mapping to offer visual representation of poverty prone areas for the planners and administrators. The main objective of this paper is to focus light on how poverty mapping can be used as a tool to identify poverty clusters and help to reduce poverty by necessary resource allocation. Information Technology can play vital role for quick dissemination of statistics and poverty maps.

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2. Role of Poverty Mapping to Combat Poverty. Economists say, if economic growth can be accelerated, more employment will be generated and thus, poverty will be reduced, having been more people employed. This macro doctrine could not help reduce inequality and most of the poor could not derive benefit out of it. Pro-poor action plan of I-PRSP suggest to target the poor identifying the poverty prone area for greater resource allocation to reduce poverty. Poverty related statistics and indicators are provided by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) in tabular form. The administrators and programme implementing agencies may have difficulty to combine various indicators and to read spatial distribution of poverty clusters thereof. If the poverty related indicators are represented through map at district and sub-district level, poverty clusters can easily be identified and visualized. In Bangladesh where poverty reduction is a major concern for the policy makers and administrators, poverty maps will act as an important tool to identify poverty clusters and to allocate resources for poverty alleviation. Information Technology will be useful aid for quick dissemination of poverty maps to the policy makers and users.

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3. Poverty Profile of Bangladesh. 3.1 Socio-economic trend: Bangladesh has acquired impressive progress in socio-economic fields since indepence of the country in 1971. It has achieved significant progress in controlling population, increasing literacy rate and improving health situation. The population growth rate has been reduced from 2.5 percent in the mid 1970s to 1.48 percent in 2001. The infant mortality rate (IMR) has been reduced from 153 per thousand live births in the mid 1970s to 51.4 per thousand live births in 2001. The life expectancy has been increased from 47 years in the mid 1970s to 68.3 years in 2001. The literacy rate of population has been increased from 17 percent in 1974 to 45 percent in 2001. Some selected socio-economic indicators of Bangladesh are given in the table below:

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Table 1: Elected Socio-economic Indicators of Bangladesh in 1974/75 and 2001. 1. Population & Health Population size (Million) 76 130 Population growth rate 2.5 1.48 Population density 537 840 CBR (Per thousand) 41.0 17.8 CDR (Per thousand) 17.0 4.60 TFR - 2.56 IMR (Per thousand) 153 51.40 Life expectancy at birth (year) 46.8 68.3 No. of Govt. hospitals 131 663 Population per physician 12500 4147 2. Education Literacy rate 17 45 No. of Primary School (000) 36 66 No. of High School (000) 6 14 No. of College (000) 1 3 3. Agriculture Production of Rice (000 ton) 111.68 250.63 Production of wheat (000 ton) - 18.40 GDP GDP growth - 5.94 GDP growth in agriculture - 6.92 Selected Socio-economic Indicator Year 1974/75 2001

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3.2 Brief Poverty Scenario of Bangladesh: In estimating poverty, Household Expenditure Survey (HES) of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) used the Direct Calorie Intake (DCI) method until 1991-92. The main drawback of this method is that, it measures poverty solely on the basis of an individual’s nutritional intake and does not take into account non-food expenditure, such as, housing, education and medi-care. Thus, the DCI method of poverty measurement may be treated as crude estimate of poverty. The more refined measure of poverty, the poverty estimate by Cost of Basic Need (CBN) method, has been used in HES 1995-96 and HIES 2000. Under this method, both food and non-food components are considered. The threshold calorie intake per capita per day has been considered as 2,122 kilo calories. Poverty estimates of HIES 2000, 1995-96 and 1991-92 are given in the table below. Table 2 : Head Count Ratio (HCR) by residence 1991-92 to 2000.

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Poverty distribution by socio-economic variable show real fact of life. Poverty is more among the illiterate persons. Poverty reduces sharply with the increase of literacy level (grade). Poverty is more among the landless and small farm owners. Data conform the old arbitrary believe that the poor are land poor. Data show inverse cor-relation with land size, i.e. poverty is more among the small farmers and landless. The table below show distribution of poverty by some socio-economic variables :The incidence of poverty by socio-economic variables. Socio-economic variables Poverty incidence (HCR) 1995-96 2000 Literacy Illiterate 64.2 64.1 Literate 33.3 30.7 Level of education No. education 64.5 63.8 Class I-V 50.5 42.5 Class V-IX 37.7 37.1 SSC+ 13.2 15.3 Landownership Landless 58.2 67.7 < 0.05 68.9 63.2 0.05 - 0.49 64.2 57.9 0.50 – 0.49 51.0 46.3 1.50 – 2.49 40.6 34.7 2.50 – 7.49 30.9 23.9 7.50+ 9.3 8.0

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4. Poverty Reduction Strategy in Bangladesh. The Government of Bangladesh has extended the highest priority for poverty alleviation and preparing policies and programmes to combat poverty. Bangladesh is amongst those nations worldwide currently preparing the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Bangladesh has already prepared I-PRSP and working relentlessly to finalize the I-PRSP by December, 2004. Under the I-PRSP the following five broad sets of policies have been identified as a measure of poverty reduction : i) To accelerate and expand the scope for pro-poor economic growth for increasing income and employment. ii) To foster human development of the poor for raising their capabilities through education, health, nutrition and social interventions. iii) To support women’s advancement and closing of gender gaps in development. iv) To provide social safety net to the poor against unanticipated income/consumption shocks through targeted and other effort.

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v) To introduce participatory governance, enhance voice of the poor and improve non-material dimension of well being including security, power and social inclusion by reforming the antipoverty institutions and removing institutional hurdles to social mobility. The general Economic Division of Planning Commission is working to translate these policies into action plans to reduce poverty. The poverty maps by various socio-economic indicators may be useful aid to prepare such action plans. 5. Progress of Poverty Mapping and IT in BBS. 5.1 Aerial Photography: Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics has taken aerial photographs through out Bangladesh prior to the Population Census-2001 for preparing census Enumeration Area Maps. This will give an opportunity to have accurate maps down to the lowest level administrative area. This will further facilitate to combine census indicators with poverty indicators using State-of-the-art technique to produce poverty maps. Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics has a very good GIS Laboratory having Sun Solaris Server, Workstations, Are info software etc. All these may be used for poverty mapping.

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5.2 Sub-district Level Indicators and Poverty Maps. Population Census provides socio-economic data/indicators up to sub-district/thana level or down to lowest identifiable administrative area level. On the others hand, poverty indicators derived from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey(HIES) are at six administrative divisions level, Now, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics is working with World Food Programme (WFP) to combine these indicators and to produce sub-district level poverty indicators. These will be analysed using state-of-the-art technique. The following analyses will be carried out to derive index : 1) Principal Component Analysis and using factor scores to come up with all index. 2) Standardizing them (z scores) giving weights and then combining them. 3) Simple ranking of indicators and adding up the ranks. 4) Simple below mean (1)/above mean (0) and adding them up to form an index. 5) Scaling indicators according to pre-set thresholds and scaling between them and weighting them and arriving at an index. 6) Running a combination of PCA/cluster analysis to contract key poor areas and characters. All these analyses will give poverty maps at sub-district level.

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5.3 Using IT for Poverty Mapping Information Technology will be useful aid for poverty mapping. Bangladesh Bureau of statistics has intra-net through out its office. It has Web-site for data dissemination. These information technology may be fruitfully utilised to disseminate poverty maps quickly to the users, giving new dimension to poverty monitoring system. 6. Conclusion: Poverty in Bangladesh is characterized by regional variations for various agro-socio-economic and climatic reasons. I-PRSP suggest to target the poor for appropriate resource allocation to alleviate poverty. Poverty maps will provide visual presentation of intensity of poverty incidence by area. Thus, the planners and policy-makers may be guided in the right direction to allocate resources for poverty reduction. No doubt, IT will strengthen the poverty monitoring system.