A new interactive map shows relative potential for wealth creation through cash transfers. Image: New America Foundation

Moving money is easier in some places than in others. This map shows where cash transfers work best as an antipoverty tool.

This new interactive map from the New America Foundation compiles financial access data to illustrate the payment infrastructure—ATMs, mobile phones, commercial banks—that makes it possible to cheaply get cash to people who need it.

For social safety net programs to work, participants need access to a range of financial services, and the mappers have compiled both the physical and human infrastructure components contributing to overall potential for cash transfers.

Composed of 11 different indicators, the color-coded map computes a composite ‘payment infrastructure score’ for many developing countries.

Using indicators of both population and geographic proximity, the map includes ‘layers’ assessing the prevalence of physical infrastructure, such as existing commercial banks, alternate financial institutions, ATMs and point of sale terminals. The darker the country, the higher the score and the more physical access there is to this infrastructure. "Financial literacy" is measured, too.

General patterns are clear from a glance at the map: overall financial infrastructure and potential is greater in rapidly developing countries like India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, among others, while poorer and more remote countries in Africa and Central Asia currently have lower potential.

But interactive maps like this can do more than show where the money is now. They can also show what works to raise potential for wealth creation. And investors and participants can learn what has worked elsewhere.

For example, high-potential countries including Brazil and Mexico have already implemented successful cash transfer programs, facilitated through available infrastructure.

Composite maps can show where this is feasible, and at the same time can show how “countries looking to develop access to formal financial services where few have existed in the past, such as Liberia, Lesotho, Malawi, and Burkina Faso, can often more cheaply and effectively pursue financial inclusion through other means such as mobile banking and point of service terminals, especially if the target population is the poorest of the poor,” according to the New America Foundation.

Down the road, maps like this can help people worldwide find potential routes to savings-based social programs.

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Community members in Indonesia were asked to rank their own need, resulting in much higher satisfaction in aid programs. Photo: CIFOR (flickr)

Sometimes social scientists measure wealth and poverty by earnings; other times by assets. But the truth is, most people use a much simpler approach. They compare themselves to their neighbors.

It’s the idea of "keeping up with the Joneses"—the perception that to see where you stand in society, you look next door. Turns out this might be good social science, too. A recent MIT research group studying aid distribution found that neighbors comparing and ranking their own wealth relative to others in the community is really the best determinant of who has the most, and who has the most need.

By involving communities rather than relying on empirical calculations of wealth and poverty, the researchers found that aid programs were able to target those who truly had the most need. Neighbors are able to see the complexities of things like illness, single motherhood, earning potential and education level that simple asset calculations can’t account for, Fast Company reported. They also have a better idea of the type of informal work others in the community may do to make ends meet, and thus are better able to see who needs the most assistance rather than simply who fits the textbook definition of poverty.

Asking beneficiaries who's in need has another, perhaps even more important benefit. It increases satisfaction and participation in aid programs, making them more useful to exactly the people who need them.

The lesson, it seems, is easy enough. To determine who in a community should receive aid … just ask.