Government efforts to focus public funding expenditure and improve community livelihoods and service provision are
often fraught with difficulties. A key challenge is how to spatially target expenditure where it is needed most. The
information required to make robust and defensible decisions on which areas should be prioritised over others is
frequently not available. In support of the Gauteng Provincial Government’s aim to prioritise areas for development
interventions or service delivery upgrading, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory investigated a method of identifying
wards where development priorities should be focussed. The analysis was based on a range of indicators, with the goal
being to move away from mainly income-based indicators towards indicators that provide a more holistic view of the
development needs of each area. The paper describes the process that was followed to generate the indicators, presents
the sources of data utilised as well as the geospatial analysis tools that were applied, and describes the subsequent
development of an indicative mapping and decision support tool. The tool provides users with the option to manipulate
the weighting of indicators and generate associated maps of the priority wards within Gauteng province, depicting their
selected indicators. The results are hosted on the GCRO interactive GIS website and are freely available for anyone to
use.