Rangpur, Barisal divs home to highest number of poor Poverty Maps launched

About 18 per cent of the country's population live below poverty line with Rangpur and Barisal divisions having the highest number of the poor, according to the Poverty Maps 2010.
The document also said the least number of poor people live in Chittagong division. The government released the Bangladesh Poverty Map 2010 at a city hotel Wednesday.  State minister for finance MA Mannan launched the Poverty Map.
The map is the third generation of poverty maps in Bangladesh, an important statistical instrument for estimating poverty incidence up to sub-district (upazila) levels.
The Bangladesh Poverty Map 2010 and the Bangladesh Extreme Poor Poverty Map 2010 show the incidence of poverty (percentage of people living below the upper poverty line) and the incidence of extreme poverty (percentage of people living below the lower poverty line) respectively in each upazila. The zila and upazila estimates of poverty have been produced by applying a Small Area Estimation technique on data from the 2010 Household Income and Expenditure Survey and the 2011 Population Census.
The maps were developed in a joint exercise by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), the World Bank and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).
The document shows although overall 17.6 per cent of the total population of the country live below poverty line, Rangpur is the hub of 27.7 per cent poor people followed by Barisal 26.7 per cent, Sylhet 20.7 per cent, Rajshahi 16 per cent, Dhaka 15.6 per cent and Khulna 15.4 per cent.  
"The poverty map is an essential planning tool that provides powerful visuals to identify poor areas with greater accuracy," said Mr Abdul Mannan.
He said it will also provide inputs for the Seventh Five Year Plan, keeping in view the targets proposed under Vision 2021.
While Bangladesh has made impressive economic and social gains over the past decade, poverty levels continue to be a challenge with around 32 per cent of people living below the poverty line in 2010. These maps show that poverty rates vary considerably according to location, with pronounced inequalities at the division, district (zila) and sub-district (upazila) levels.
"With these latest poverty maps, we have responded to demand from policy-makers, researchers and development partners," said Statistics and Informatics Division Secretary Nojibur Rahman.
It will also facilitate the ongoing efforts to prepare database of the poor people across the country, he added.
BBS Director General Golam Mostafa Kamal said, "The latest poverty maps provide disaggregated poverty estimates to better understand the geographical variations in poverty incidence."
Experts say recognising the geographical and regional variations and spatial inequality in growth and poverty allows for more effective targeting of policy interventions based on local conditions.   Poverty maps can become an important instrument for prioritisation of policy interventions and resource allocations.
"Comparing poverty maps with maps of social and other indicators that are correlated with poverty helps identify key impediments and bottlenecks that poor people face," World Bank Lead Economist Salman Zaidi said.
"I hope the government will find the poverty maps helpful to plan better targeted interventions."
The maps show that the northern and southern districts, apart from Barisal, have a high prevalence of poverty and low primary school completion rates.
Similarly, poverty appears to be high in chronic disaster-prone areas, such as the districts along the Jamuna River where communities are repeatedly affected by river erosion and flooding, and in the south-west which is prone to cyclones, tidal surges, salt water intrusion and water-logging.
"These poverty maps also provide a good indication of where the most food insecure areas of the country are.  In Bangladesh, with well-functioning markets, people's purchasing power remains the most important factor in their access to food," said WFP Representative Christa Räder.
There are more than 55 per cent poor people in the 10 upazilas of Dhaka division and four per cent extreme poor people live in the 10 upazilas.  
On the other hand, 50 per cent extreme poor people live in six upazilas of Chittagong, and less than four per cent poor below poverty live in the six upazilas. In the 11 rich upazilas of Rangpur division, the rate of poverty is the same of the national average and in 60 upazilas, the poverty rate is 60 per cent.