A study carried out by Boston-based Tufts University delivers new information on undernourished children in Panama, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic. GfK GeoMarketing donated digital maps for the cartographic analyses underpinning the project.

Reducing poverty and hunger is one of the United Nation’s most important humanitarian goals. Sadly, children are the most common sufferers of malnourishment. This lack of nutrition is a key factor in numerous illnesses, retarded cognitive development and child mortality rates.

One of the preliminary steps in eliminating hunger is to identify the precise locations where the problem is most pervasive.

The Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston, USA is a leading force in the research of malnourishment as well as the development of innovative approaches to combating the problem.

In association with the United Nations’ World Food Programme and the governments of Panama, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, the Tufts hunger-mapping team developed a groundbreaking method for measuring the scale of the hunger problem by identifying the number of affected children at the microgeographic level. The aim of this initiative was to give governments in these areas the ability to channel and distribute their resources as efficiently as possible. The project identified the characteristics of the most affected areas (e.g. urban vs. rural, mountainous vs. coastal, etc.), allowing speculations regarding the region-specific causes of the malady.

The cartographic representation of these areas contributed toward a better understanding of the exact parameters of the problem. Thanks to the intuitive and impact-generating nature of the maps produced by the project, greater awareness was raised among researchers, policy-makers and the general public, inciting renewed efforts to alleviate the situation.

The so-called “hunger maps” of Panama, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic were created used ESRI’s ArcGIS along with a special analytic approach known as “small area estimations”. This made it possible to take data from a representative study covering a broad region and combine it with the team’s own research data as well as socio-demographic information in order to create regional profiles and prognoses.

GfK GeoMarketing provided the research team with its digital maps of Panama, which contained boundaries of the country’s administrative units as well as its larger cities. Among other things, these maps helped the team determine the distances between metropolitan areas and the various villages and communities where the problem was most acute.

Most governments collect information on the nutritional situation in their countries by carrying out nationwide studies that evaluate a wide range of factors, including geographic, socio-demographic, socio-economic and cultural conditions. By associating this data with detailed geographic information, it’s possible to make much more accurate predictions regarding the likelihood of malnutrition in certain areas. The Tufts approach cast a broad net by taking additional key factors into consideration, including the degree of agricultural land usage, climate, access to medical care and education as well as the accessibility of economic centers.

The governments who participated in the project are now using Tufts University‘s hunger-distribution maps and assessment methodology as a means of optimizing their national nutritional programs. 

Author: James Wirth, Tufts University

For more information on the study and Tufts University‘s hunger-mapping team, please contact James Wirth at ipwirth(at)gmail.com. Results of the study can be viewed at www.nutrition.tufts.edu.