Abstract
Improving rural household access to resources such as markets, schools and healthcare can help alleviate poverty in low-income settings. Current models of geographic accessibility to various resources rarely take individual variation into account due to a lack of appropriate data, yet understanding mobility at an individual level is key to knowing how people access their local resources. Our study used both an activity-specific survey and GPS trackers to evaluate how adults in a rural area of western Kenya accessed local resources. We calculated the travel time and time spent at six different types of resource and compared the GPS and survey data to see how well they matched. We found links between several demographic characteristics and the time spent at different resources, and that the GPS data reflected the survey data well for time spent at some types of resource, but poorly for others. We conclude that demography and activity are important drivers of mobility, and a better understanding of individual variation in mobility could be obtained through the use of GPS trackers on a wider scale.
Highlights
Population mobility is a complex process with great importance in many fields across the social and health sciences (Wesolowski et al, 2012; Prothero, 1977; Bajardi et al, 2011)
Using a paired t -test we found significant differences in the mean proportions of time spent at other households and places of worship (p = 0.002 and p = 0.041, respectively) between the survey and Global Positioning System (GPS) datasets
Better understanding of how accessibility varies with type of activity and with an individual’s socioeconomic context could help inform future analyses on geographic accessibility
Summary
Population mobility is a complex process with great importance in many fields across the social and health sciences (Wesolowski et al, 2012; Prothero, 1977; Bajardi et al, 2011). People travel because of specific resource needs or activities such as gathering food and water, livelihood and occupational activities, or accessing healthcare. In low-income settings, travel to these resources can be very time-consuming or expensive meaning that people may forego healthcare, employment, or other resources. In Kenya, resource access is important for poverty reduction in rural populations, as people often have to travel further for resource-related activities than their urban counterparts. It is widely accepted that people in rural areas spend more time accessing resources than people in urban areas, and that this likely contributes
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