Poverty Population and Its Educational Accessibility: An Evaluation using Geospatial Database in Ecuador

Abstract

Education is the most critical aspect against inequality. So, the accessibility to educational centers is one of the biggest problems that governments and academia are trying to solve in Latin America. Finding an optimal location is challenging because different variables can be considered, such as serving the poor, accessing to roads, and optimal distribution. This work presents a methodology that uses geospatial techniques to evaluate the level of access of poor people to educational centers considering location and accessibility. This methodology is multi factorial and can be generalized to multiple scenarios in resource planning. In this work, a case study of Ecuadorian educational centers is analyzed. So, an Ecuadorian geospatial database was created that includes educational centers’ location, the distribution of the poor population, Voronoi diagrams, and road networks. All the analysis were carried out using the PostGIS tool and Google Cloud Platform for the implementation. The results show that 90% of educational centers serve at least 50% of the most impoverished population.