Abstract
Government efforts to focus public funding expenditure and improve community livelihoods and service provision are often fraught with difficulties. A key challenge is how to spatially target expenditure where it is needed most. The information required to make robust and defensible decisions on which areas should be prioritised over others is frequently not available. In support of the Gauteng Provincial Government’s aim to prioritise areas for development interventions or service delivery upgrading, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory investigated a method of identifying wards where development priorities should be focussed. The analysis was based on a range of indicators, with the goal being to move away from mainly income-based indicators towards indicators that provide a more holistic view of the development needs of each area. The paper describes the process that was followed to generate the indicators, presents the sources of data utilised as well as the geospatial analysis tools that were applied, and describes the subsequent development of an indicative mapping and decision support tool. The tool provides users with the option to manipulate the weighting of indicators and generate associated maps of the priority wards within Gauteng province, depicting their selected indicators. The results are hosted on the GCRO interactive GIS website and are freely available for anyone to use.