Poverty Data

What?
The Sedac Ciesin Global Distribution of Poverty site is one of the best portals for downloading poverty related geodata.
The Global Poverty Mapping Project seeks to enhance current understanding of the global distribution of poverty and the geographic and biophysical conditions of where the poor live. Here you can find poverty related data in shp, xls and csv format or create your own map online.

The global data sets include:

Infant Mortality Rates and

Malnutrition (underweight children), all translated to a common quarter-degree grid.

The sub national data includes:

Small Area Estimate: Consumption-based poverty and inequality measures and related data for subnational administrative units in: Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

Poverty & Food Security Case Studies: Poverty and food security measures for subnational administrative units in: Mexico, Ecuador, Kenya, Malawi, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.

Unsatisfied Basic Needs: Measures of unmet basic needs for subnational administrative units of numerous countries in Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru.

How?
On the top menu click on "Datasets" and choose if you want information (data in xls format), global data (either shp or xls of all country level data) or click on national data. Here, you can download poverty data according to subnational administrative units for each country, in shp format. You can also customize this dataset and then download it in csv format.

If you don't have GIS software, click on "maps" on the main menu and either download existing poverty maps or create your own by navigating to the Sedac Map Client.

Who?
The Poverty Mapping Project at CIESIN (The Center for International Earth Science Information Network) at the Earth Institute at Columbia University is funded by the World Bank’s Japan Policy and Human Resource Development (PHRD) Fund.

When?
This Project was a partnership between CIESIN, the World Bank, and the Earth Institute at Columbia University and was undertaken in 2004-2005.