A Simple Poverty Scorecard for Kenya 2008

Helping pro-poor organizations monitor and manage social performance

This paper presents a scorecard that estimates the likelihood that a person in Kenya has expenditure below the given poverty line. It uses data from the 1997 Kenya Welfare Monitoring Survey. The scorecard is easy to understand and uses 10 indicators that field workers can quickly collect and verify while on field. Its transparency and simplicity builds trust. The scorecard can be used by pro-poor programs in Kenya to:

Monitor groups' poverty rates at a point in time;
Track changes in groups' poverty rates between two points in time;
Target services to clients.

The scorecard is inexpensive to implement and can be understood by non-specialists. It is designed to be practical for local pro-poor organizations wanting to improve the monitoring and management of their social performance and speed up their clients progress out of poverty.