Simple Poverty Scorecards

This presentation discusses the advantages of poverty scorecards (PPIs) to measure poverty rates. It discusses PPI features, uses and selection of indicators. It illustrates how PPIs estimate and tracks changes in poverty rates with examples from Bangladesh. It also discusses the accuracy of PPIs and compares it with other poverty measurement tools. PPIs are simple, easy to use, inexpensive, transparent, objective and accurate. Field workers can use PPIs to compute scores on paper in real time. PPIs:

• Estimate the likelihood that a person is poor;
• Use policy cut-offs for targeting;
• Track progress out of poverty over time;
• Give importance to practicality and accuracy;
• Can be used for any program, not just microfinance;
• Can be used to target the poor;
• Are based on national survey data;
• Use indicators that are commonsensical, verifiable, quick to ask and answer and liable to change over time;
• Use indicators that exclude total value of assets, subjective judgements, ratios, squares and logarithms, and events in the past;
• Use indicators include current presence of physical objects and are related to Millennium Development goals.