A GIS Database Design for Urban Poverty Management

Poverty is a socio-economic scourge raging at varying degrees throughout the African continent. Its prevalence is most pervasive in the cores of African traditional cities than in the urban peripheries which tend to be more modernized. Non-recognition of the heterogeneous nature of urban poverty and the many players involved in its management has only helped to aggravate the problem. Consequently, a holistic planning, implementation and control approach is imperative. This should involve all tiers of government, non-governmental bodies, donor agencies, international organizations with
the research community on one hand, and a combination of historical, economical, sociological, anthropological and spatial perspectives on the other hand. The spatial perspective, which is the main focus of this paper, serves to interface with the other perspectives since people are used to space and they live in space. In this regard, Geographic Information technology (GIT) is of utmost importance with the Spatial Database Management System (DBMS) as its heart. The essence of any DBMS is that data should be stored in an organized manner for easy retrieval to aid decision-making. Moreover, the use of GIS for poverty-related data handling is superior not only to manual (traditional) data handling methods, but advantageous over other information systems as it admits data coming from different sources. This is because GIS derives effective results on
making decisions on alleviating poverty by analysis and mapping via efficient spatial and attribute data storage and handling. This paper centres on the design of a GIS database for urban poverty assessment and inventory mapping. It is concerned with improving the effectiveness of managing urban poverty by designing a generic model showing the datasets and the relationships required for poverty appraisal application. In a bid to carry out this objective the database for poverty assessment and mapping in the Geographic Targeting GIS (GTGIS) is planned for the city of Ibadan, Nigeria (a UNCHS (Habitat) “Sustainable Urban Management Programme” case study in 1996).