It is now generally agreed that human well-being has many dimensions and that poverty is a pronounced
deprivation in well-being. It means lacking food, shelter and clothing; being sick and having very limited or no
access to health services; being illiterate and having few or no educational opportunities, having little security and
being especially vulnerable to outside events such as natural disasters and economic crises; and being excluded
from power and political access.
No single indicator exists to measure all these dimensions of poverty simultaneously. Efforts to measure human
well-being have thus concentrated on collecting data separately for some of them. For example, income or
consumption measurements are used to capture material deprivation and health, nutrition and education indicators
to capture low levels of achievement in health and education.
Current investments in data collection and methodology development for statistical estimation and mapping
techniques are not sufficient to produce global poverty estimates at spatial resolutions significantly below national
averages. However, various efforts are in progress that could make a global, high-resolution poverty map a reality
within a few years. International and national development agencies have a growing interest in focusing
development efforts on the poor. This increasing demand for maps showing the location of the poor could help to
shape prioritisation efforts that go beyond country rankings, improve geographic targeting and illuminate the causeand-effect
relationships between poverty and other dimensions of development, such as environmental and health
outcomes.