Developing regional poverty profiles: based on local perceptions

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. The centre of the methodology is inquiry into local perceptions of poverty, based on the local informantsÆ ability to rank their neighbours in terms of poverty and well-being status. The manual is intended for professionals that are involved in designing, planning, and evaluating research and/or development activities. It requires computer facilities to be fully implemented, and some familiarity with spreadsheet and statistics programmes. The methodology is described in nine steps: site selection; ranking well-being; well-being household grouping; extrapolating well-being rankings; developing indicators of well-being; constructing a well-being index; checking the internal and external logic of the well-being index; defining well-being categories according to the index; and creating and using a regional poverty profile. Throughout the manual it is illustrated how the method worked for a case study conducted in 1997-1998 in the departments of Atlantida, El Paraiso, and Yoro in Honduras.