Microfinance Practice: Re: [MFP] Paper available: "How Do the Poverty Scorecard and the PAT Differ?"

Thanks Sean, I and my two co-authors (John Belt of KIT and Rajeev Roy of IIM Raipur) of a book/study of what we call 'for profit inclusive value chains' (VCs that substantially benefit large numbers of poor people and have not and are not aided, subsidised and so on) hardly qualify as 'an organisation'. But we have been using the PPI to get an idea of how participating in the VCs benefit people. Our case writers ask a small sample of them to answer the questions today, and five years ago or whenever they first joined the VC. Not very systematic, for sure not an RCT, but it's useful.

Recalling the answers does not seem to be very difficult, people do remember more or less when they acquired this or that important asset, or household members. The main problems have been the inapplicability of the questions (Assam in North East India is far more different from Kerala in South West India than say Malawi is from Zambia, but there's one PPI for all of India) and the lack of any PPI for places such as Somaliland.

Malcolm

From: Sean Kline

Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2014 1:02 AM

To: Microfinance Practice

Subject: Re: [MFP] Paper available: "How Do the Poverty Scorecard and the PAT Differ?"

Thanks Mark.

Can you (or others) share any recent examples of organizations that are using one or both of these tools?

And for anyone out there using a poverty scorecard, have you used it beyond determining the likely poverty status of people you serve to measure changes in poverty status over time?

Cheers,
Sean

On Feb 28, 2014, at 2:57 PM, Mark Schreiner <mark@microfinance.com> wrote:

Abstract: "The poverty scorecard and the Poverty Assessment Tool (PAT) are simple, low-cost ways to measure households' poverty. How do the two differ? For estimating a group's poverty rate, both are unbiased, and the scorecard has smaller standard errors. For targeting individual households, the PAT correctly classifies about one more household per 100. The scorecard has an edge in availability, recentness, and transparency."

Download at: http://www.microfinance.com/English/Papers/Scorecard_versus_PAT.pdf

Mark Schreiner