Mapping Poverty for Sustainable Development Using AI, A Review of Literature

Extreme poverty is among the challenges the United Nations seeks to eradicate by the year 2030 as outlined in its Sustainable Development Goals. However, governments and other stakeholders face challenges in accurately identifying poverty in households for evidence- based implementation of SDG programs. Current strategies are slow, inaccurate and costly to efficiently support efforts to identify poverty for sustainable development. Consequently, many strategies to map out poverty for intervention measures do not succeed which could be contributing to the global decline in the rate of reducing poverty. Artificial intelligence which has become widely available and has been used in many sectors, could be leveraged to improve poverty mapping for evidence-based interventions for sustainable development. Despite living in the era of AI, it has not been fully utilized in mapping poverty. This review seeks to explore the extent of research on the adoption of AI in mapping poverty so as to find the gap for further research. It aims to establish the extent of AI-based research on identification of poverty in respect to global distribution of research studies, methods, algorithms and sources of data which have been used in studies to identify poverty. The findings will help to identify gaps for research to help in designing evidence-based strategies for intervention measures. A systematic review was done for the period 2020 to 2024 using databases and snowballing hybrid search approach. A qualitative analysis was done on the extracted data to uncover new patterns and identify research gaps.