Poverty and inequality maps - spatial descriptions of the distribution of poverty and inequality - are most useful to policy-makers and researchers when they are finely disaggregated, i.e. when they represent small geographic units, such as cities, municipalities, regions or other administrative partitions of a country. In order to produce poverty and inequality maps, large data sets are required which include reasonable measures of income or consumption expenditure and which are representative and of sufficient size at low levels of aggregation to yield statistically reliable estimates. Household budget surveys or living standard surveys covering income and consumption normally used to calculate distributional measures are rarely of a sufficient size; whereas census or other large sample surveys big enough to allow disaggregation have little or no information regarding monetary variables.
Often the required small area estimates are based on a combination of sample surveys and administrative data. In this paper we aim at performing poverty and inequality mapping primarily using an alternative source of data: data from a Population Census, in conjunction with an intensive small scale national sample survey.