Poverty eradication as a policy issue has received significant attention since the
promulgation of the South African National Development Plan (NDP). The NDP envisages
that by 2030 income poverty should be eradicated. To do this government must accurately
target their interventions ensuring that the intended population benefits from the actual
poverty eradication intervention. With the evolution of systems and processes in the Science
and Technology industry over the past two decades, the integration of GIS and MCDM
techniques has achieved encouraging results within different planning domains. This
research paper presents a vector – based GIS – MCDM methodology that combines
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to
the Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). This integration is facilitated through the use of loose coupling
within the ArcGIS 10.2 environment.
A case study in the City of Cape Town is used to demonstrate the use of the methodology
and how it can be applied to conduct an evaluation study to rank each of the communities
based on poverty measures. The results of the GIS – MCDM analysis show that a significant
cluster of high levels of poverty existing in the southern part of the City of Cape Town:
Khayelitsha, Philippi, Gugulethu, Nyanga ect. Moreover the prominence of apartheid led
spatial planning and the resulting socio – economic segregation across the City of Cape
Town is still spatially evident across two decades after democracy. Thus the above map can
be used by planners and decision makers to inform better decision making by ensuring that
the fiscal budgets are targeted at the correct communities thus ensuring that the intended
benefit population actually benefit.