Levy, Sarah

This article discusses a participatory approach to measuring poverty for assessment of poverty-targeting interventions. This method was developed from work carried out in Malawi during evaluations of the Targeted Inputs Programme (TIP). The article presents what has been done so far with the participatory approach and discusses the challenges that lie ahead. The approach involves absolute as well as relative measurements of poverty and a technique called community mapping with cards.

This paper aims to show that it is possible to generate statistics which will be taken seriously by policy makers from research using participatory methods. A key requirement is to produce results from a representative sample, which can be generalised in order to reach conclusions for the population of interest. This implies working in a larger number of sites than is common for most studies which use participatory methods. However, the Malawi experience presented in this paper shows that it is possible to organise such studies at a reasonable cost.