Ravnborg, Helle Munk

The manual has its origins in field work conducted by CIAT (International Centre for Tropical Agriculture) in Tanzania between 1989 and 1991. Previous PPAs (Participatory Poverty Assessments) have failed to develop measures of poverty that adequately reflect local concepts of poverty, and the conditions of poverty, so that these can be compared with other sites. This manual presents a method for measuring poverty that seeks to resolve this difficulty by identifying, extrapolating, and quantifying local perceptions of poverty and thus develop a regional measure of poverty.

This paper argues that local perceptions of poverty have tended to be used as mere additions to more conventional poverty assessments because not only do people's perceptions of poverty differ making it difficult to compare results across locations but also, little is known about how to aggregate these local perceptions to be able to estimate overall levels of poverty at regional and national levels. Work carried out in Honduras to test a methodology designed to overcome these constraints is reported on step by step in the document.