How Satellites Can Help Us Understand Global Poverty

Citizen surveys are the most comprehensive means available to track poverty, but they aren’t perfect. They cost money, take time, and can’t guarantee accurate responses. Surveys might also not be feasible in many of the poorest pockets of the world where they’re most needed, if these areas are too remote or dangerous; a recent World Bank analysis found that 29 countries had no poverty data at all from 2002 to 2011.

In the ongoing quest to plug in these data holes and improve our understanding of global poverty, highly detailed satellite images might be a very useful new tool. To that end, the World Bank recently partnered with two geospatial mapping companies and a geography professor at George Washington University on a pilot research project that aims to extract potentially useful economic information from photos taken in space.