Welcome

Microenterprise development programs have been among the most promising donor-sponsored programs for improving the lives of poor people. In 2000, the U.S. Congress passed the Microenterprise for Self-Reliance and International Anti-Corruption Act, which mandated that half of all USAID microenterprise funds benefit the very poor. To verify that USAID meets this target, subsequent legislation requires USAID to develop and certify low-cost tools for assessing the poverty status of microenterprise clients, and to require its microenterprise implementing partners to use those tools to measure and report the share of their clients who are very poor. Each USAID-developed Poverty Assessment Tool consists of a short, country-specific household survey—administered in twenty minutes or less—and a data entry template. Using such a tool, an implementing partner can gain an accurate estimate of the share of its clients who are very poor.

A team based at the IRIS Center at the University of Maryland is implementing this work with USAID's Microenterprise Development division under the Enabling Environment component of the Accelerated Microenterprise Advancement Project (AMAP).

Beginning in Fiscal Year 2007, USAID Implementing Partners Must Measure and Report the Poverty Status of Their Clients

In all countries with a USAID-certified Poverty Assessment Tool, USAID’s microenterprise implementing partners* must use their country-specific tool to measure the share of their clients who are very poor, and must report the results to USAID through the Microenterprise Results Reporting (MRR) system. As of FY 2007, tools have been certified for 17 countries:

Albania, Bangladesh, Colombia, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Madagascar, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, Tajikistan, Uganda, and Vietnam.

This site is intended to help those organizations apply the Poverty Assessment Tools. For more information, please click on the relevant navigation tabs above, especially those leading to the USAID Tools and FAQ pages.

*With certain exceptions (discussed under “Who Must Report?” on the USAID Tools page), this requirement applies to all implementing partners that received at least $100,000 in USAID funding during FY 2007 to support microenterprise development activities.

If you are required to implement a PAT for FY2007 and have not yet received training, please contact the PAT Help Desk (pathelp@iris.econ.umd.edu) for assistance in making use of the online training materials.