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An operational tool for evaluating poverty outreach of development policies and projects

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  • Zeller, Manfred
  • Sharma, Manohar
  • Lapenu, Cécile
  • Henry, Carla

Abstract

Development institutions and projects frequently seek to target poorer segments of the population. Yet, existing methods for evaluating their outreach are generally unsuited to most operational settings, since they are either too costly and cumbersome (e.g., detailed income or household surveys), or they produce results that are not comparable between villages or regions within a country (e.g., participatory poverty appraisals). This paper presents a new and operationally suitable method to measure the poverty of clients of development projects in relation to the general population of nonclients. The method was developed in response to demands by donors and development practitioners for a low-cost evaluation instrument that could be used as a regular operational tool for assessing the poverty outreach of a development project or institution. While the method was originally developed for the purpose of assessing the poverty outreach of microfinance institutions (MFIs), we believe the method can be used for any development policy or project that pursues an explicit objective of reaching poorer people. The paper begins by discussing existing methods of poverty assessment. Next, the paper presents heuristic steps for identifying indicators of poverty to be tested in the case studies, including the questionnaire that was field tested in four countries with large differences in poverty-level, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts, and with MFIs that worked either in urban, rural, or mixed areas with different target clientele and financial products. The authors then describe the method of principal component analysis used to construct a poverty score as the measure of relative poverty. The paper concludes with a summary of results from four country case studies (two in Sub-Saharan Africa, one in South Asia, and one in Central America).

Suggested Citation

  • Zeller, Manfred & Sharma, Manohar & Lapenu, Cécile & Henry, Carla, 2001. "An operational tool for evaluating poverty outreach of development policies and projects," FCND briefs 111, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
  • Handle: RePEc:fpr:fcndbr:111
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    Cited by:

    1. Dufhues, Thomas & Buchenrieder, Gertrud, 2005. "Outreach of credit institutes and households' access constraints to formal credit in Northern Vietnam," Research in Development Economics and Policy (Discussion Paper Series) 8535, Universitaet Hohenheim, Department of Agricultural Economics and Social Sciences in the Tropics and Subtropics.
    2. Akib Khan & Atonu Rabbani, 2015. "Assessing The Spatial Accessibility Of Microfinance In Northern Bangladesh: A Gis Analysis," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 55(5), pages 842-870, November.
    3. John Weiss & Heather Montgomery, 2005. "Great Expectations: Microfinance and Poverty Reduction in Asia and Latin America," Oxford Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(3-4), pages 391-416.
    4. Asad K. Ghalib, 2013. "How effective is microfinance in reaching the poorest? Empirical evidence on programme outreach in rural Pakistan," Journal of Business Economics and Management, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(3), pages 467-480, June.
    5. Edig, Xenia van & Schwarze, Stefan & Zeller, Manfred, 2013. "Poverty Assessment by Proxy-Means Tests: Are Indicator-Based Estimations Robust over Time? A Study from Central Sulawesi, Indonesia," Quarterly Journal of International Agriculture, Humboldt-Universitaat zu Berlin, vol. 52(1), pages 1-23, February.
    6. Namara, Regassa E. & Hope, Lesley & Sarpong, Eric Owusu & De Fraiture, Charlotte & Owusu, Diana, 2014. "Adoption patterns and constraints pertaining to small-scale water lifting technologies in Ghana," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 131(C), pages 194-203.
    7. Tiken Das & Pradyut Guha & Diganta Das, 2021. "Do the Heterogeneous Determinants of Repayment Affect Differently across Borrowers of Diverse Credit Sources in Rural Assam? A Double Hurdle Approach," Journal of Development Policy and Practice, , vol. 6(2), pages 188-209, July.
    8. Imran Matin & Munshi Sulaiman, 2010. "Targeting Effectiveness of CFPR/TUP in Scale-up Environment," Working Papers id:2568, eSocialSciences.

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    Poverty Research Evaluation ;

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