What does the map show?
I. Sector and Sub-sector Filters
Sectors
- Humanitarian Relief - Projects with outputs that address immediate nutritional, medical, and other critical health needs. Often, humanitarian relief takes place after severe flooding and targets young children and pregnant women.
- Business - For-profit initiatives that are in the forms of equity joint ventures, contractual joint ventures, and wholly-owned foreign subsidiaries.
- Development Assistance - Projects with outputs that address longer-term needs related to self-sustaining methods of producing food, energy, and clean water.
- Educational Assistance - Projects that address needs in the DPRK education system.
- Professional Training - Projects that as standalone activities introduce new disciplines, skills, or general international industry standards to professionals in the DPRK.
Different colors represent the five sectors and selecting more than one sector will illustrate what types of work is present in various parts of the country. These five sectors were chosen because after extensive research and exposure to the nature of engagement activities in the DPRK, these were the most common sectors we identified through which foreigners could build relationships with a variety of people in the DPRK, including mid-level bureaucrats and average citizens. Other efforts such as cultural, athletic, or political exchanges are also important, and we hope to be able to include these categories in future stages of the project.
Practitioners have widely shared that some parts of the country are more accessible to certain types of work; for instance, businesses may have access to locations appropriate for investment while humanitarian organizations may only have access to areas where there is a specific need. However, there is never an open list of all-possible locations from which foreigners can thoughtfully select. The formula for access is not always clear, so it is helpful to visualize what kind of projects have been given access to specific locations, and explore future opportunities.
Sub-sectors
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Humanitarian Relief |
Business |
Development Assistance |
Educational Assistance |
Professional Training |
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Creating Sector and Sub-sector Names
The country has experienced chronic humanitarian needs; therefore, activities that may seem like Development Assistance, such as hospital renovations or food factories, are actually necessary to meet immediate medical or food shortage needs. Additionally, development projects generally require specific protocols and standards as operating conditions for the appropriate skills transfer and capacity building inherent in the projects, and these conditions have been difficult to meet in the DPRK. Hence, some work that the international development community would categorize as “development work” functions, in practice, as a humanitarian project. Therefore, the main distinction used for the DPRK is in whether the project outputs meet immediate or longer-term needs.
For more information on how the UN categorizes its work in the DPRK, please refer to the UN Theme Groups featured on the UN Resident Coordinator’s website. Projects in the UN Theme Groups overlap with our projects sectors in the following ways:
- Humanitarian Relief – Food Security & Agriculture; Nutrition; Health
- Development Assistance – Data Collection; Food Security & Agriculture; Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH); Climate, Energy, and Environment
- Educational Assistance – Education
II. Base Layers
The menu box on the top right side of the screen allows users to choose various layers to provide contextual information for the DPRK map. These layers are intended to help contextualize the distribution of the projects, as well as spur analytical questions regarding the locations of projects and what life might be like for people living in different conditions with varying access to foreign engagement. They include the:
- “Flooded Areas” Layer – This base layer illustrates which counties and cities were damaged by severe flooding since 1996. The darker the area, the higher number of years that it has been damaged by floods and landslides. Due to inconsistent availability of data, we were not able to identify all of the counties or cities that were affected each year; however, this layer reflects about 80% of the locations that have been affected by severe flooding. Data for flooding was gathered through information provided on UN’s Relief Web site and the DPRK’s Korea Central News Agency. This base layer may be helpful to use as context when observing the distribution of humanitarian relief projects throughout the country.
- Markets Layer – This base layer illustrates approximately 200 marketplaces that were identified as of June 2009 by the North Korea Uncovered project on Google Earth and as of April 2013 in Google Maps. Marketplaces are areas where transactions and exchanges most often take place, and may provide insight to the interplay between the domestic availability of resources and foreign assistance or investment. The majority of marketplaces are located in Pyongyang, South Phyongan, and South Hwanghae provinces, near city centers that are accessible by roads. These marketplaces are government regulated, and while other informal marketplaces are known to exist, there is little available information on them. Given the rapid expansion of formal marketplaces in recent years, there are many more markets beyond those identified in this base layer and we will be updating this layer once we are able to find their locations. This base layer may be helpful to use as context for observing the various locations of business and humanitarian relief activities throughout the country.
- Population Layer – This base layer illustrates the distribution of people throughout the DPRK and darker areas indicate a higher population count. Additional population statistics – such as the total population, percentage of females, urban to rural ratio, and percentage of children 9 years or younger – will be available for each province in the “Location Info” window. This base layer may be helpful to use as context for understanding the locations of the development assistance, humanitarian relief, and educational assistance projects throughout the country.
III. Project Clusters
Once users have selected sectors, they will see dots appearing on the map. The size of the clusters reflects the number of projects in the city or county, and the more projects there are, the larger the cluster size. The dots are located near the centroid of the county (군) or city (시) instead of the exact geographical coordinates, since these clusters do not reflect exact locations of projects. The sizes and distributions of clusters help users to visualize the levels of engagement taking place throughout the country. The projects that are included in each dot meet the following conditions:
- They require some type of relationship or contact between foreign organizations and DPRK people or mid-level bureaucrats/technocrats. These are not security, scientific, or other exchanges.
- The project operation takes place inside the country.
- They have been in operation for more than 6 months.
One project may belong to multiple sub-sectors and even have some work being done that qualifies as another sector, but the project categorizes it into the most relevant sector and sub-sector. Additionally, some projects may be counted more than once, but when partnerships have been identified, the project is only represented once.
The map illustrates about 70% of the data we have; the map does not include projects for which we did not have complete information and those projects that organizations did not want revealed. Over time, as we get more data on city or county level locations, as well as years of operations for the projects, we will be able to upload more information. We hope to do another significant data upload before the end of the year, and subsequently update the website once a year.
IV. Timeline
The timeline at the top of the screen above the map allows users to filter projects by year in order to see how engagement has change over time.
The timeline starts at 1995 because that is when North Korea began opening up to foreign assistance. The timeline ends in 2012 because that is the last year for which we had a complete dataset. Additionally, it is likely that the map will always have a one year lag due to the time it takes to gather and upload the data.
In order to create a tool that was simple and easy to navigate, we decided to only allow filtering by year, instead of month or day. This means that when looking at projects from 2001-2002, one project might have lasted from December 2001 to July 2002, while another could have lasted from January 2001 to December 2002. There is clearly a difference between these two time frames, but we decided to group projects by year so that the map could depict large-scale trends over the years.