Increase government interest in poor areas by improving health and education services and providing other basic services.Also,provide job opportunities in these areas.
AS I understan d your question, it is about finding where and how much poverty there is ,not about how to imporve peoples wellfare and reduce poverty. Yes?
There are several sources that track poverty all over the world and are considered quite reputable. May are government sources, but also some some private ngos do it.
Poverty can be defined and measured in many ways. It is also likely that manifestations of poverty differ between rural and urban areas, between social groups and over time. For this reason, the Institut National de santé publique du Québec (Canada) works on an ecological multidimensional index of deprivation where lack of income is considered separately from being employed or living in housing in need of major renovations or being too expensive for the income level (for example). Poverty can be absolute (usually measured by a poverty line in $) or relative (measured as below 60% of the median income of people in that country, for example). It can have other consequences than just material lack of money, food, warm clothing, housing, etc. such as the lack of sustaining social relationships, access to services, etc.
Our institue offers an index of material and social deprivation for all of Canada at a very detailed geographical level since 1991 to the research community (https://www.inspq.qc.ca/en/expertise/information-management-and-analysis/deprivation-index). If the researcher has a definition of urban and rural geography, he/she can identify the local deprivation with the help of the index. The values are age and sex-stratified which allows the comparison of different regions. Poverty in different regions can be followed over time however it is a cross-sectional comparison of area-based deprivation and not the follow-up of individual poverty. If interested, you can find papers published using this index on the referred page. In 2018 we will publish the 2016 version of the index and hopefully there will be a prototype of the new, multidimensional index too.