Assessment Tools: Client Conditions & Poverty

These following tools help determine the absolute poverty level of clients:

Progress Out of Poverty Index (PPI): The PPI scorecards use a small set of simple, easily observable, and objective indicators to estimate the share of clients who are below an established poverty line. 

USAID Poverty Assessment Tool: The USAID Poverty Assessment Tool is a set of country-specific surveys, developed under contract with the IRIS Center at the University of Maryland, to predict the prevalence of extreme poverty within a group of people. 

FINCA Client Assessment Tool (FCAT): The FCAT employs a set of 13 individual screens to record income sources and dependents, monthly household expenditures, and daily per capita expenditures and poverty levels. 

The following tools help determine the relative poverty level of clients:

CGAP Poverty Assessment Tool: Multidimensional poverty index which provides rigorous data on client poverty levels relative to people in the same community, and allows for comparisons between MFIs and across countries. The tool involves a survey of 200 randomly selected clients and 300 non-clients, takes about four months to complete, and costs around $10,000.

Housing Index: An index that uses the structure of the house, and sometimes the compound, to differentiate between economic levels of households and identify those who are poor.

Means Test: Very simple household surveys using a small number of easily verifiable indicators. These are used to create a score which provides an assessment of an individual household’s poverty level.

Participatory Wealth Ranking (PWR): A ranking by community members of the relative poverty or wealth of households using perceptions and criteria defined by community members themselves.