Preliminary Design of a Spatial Decision Support System for Poverty Management

Saddled with the burden of increasing poverty among majority of their populace, many African countries are initiating various Poverty Alleviation Programmes (PAP). Many of these programmes however miss out the influence of geography and spatial variables as determinants of poverty, that is, the spatial dimension of the problem of poverty. Attempts are increasing being made to use GIS for poverty analysis and visualization in the emerging field of poverty mapping sees which poverty maps as useful input into decision making. However, experience with the use of GIS for decision making in the social sciences, especially for poverty handling has revealed several shortcomings. A major problem arises from the fuzzy nature of such a social problem which makes it in most cases to be “unstructured”. Hence, this necessitates the input of preferences, intuitive judgement and the to examine choices of alternatives in the decision making process. This limits GIS as a decision support tool when handling complex, multifaceted, illstructured social problems, despite its increasing analytical capabilities. This paper describes the preliminary design of the Geographic Targeting Geo-Information System (GTGIS) which integrates various GIS tools, socio-economic data modelling and Decision Support System’s (DSS) capabilities of choice modelling for poverty management. 1. THE POVERTY SCOURGE