How do you implement the USAID Poverty Assessment Tools?

How can your organization learn how to implement a PAT?

The PAT implementation manual is the best step-by-step guide to implementing a poverty assessment tool. It has been written with the intent to explain the entire implementation procedure. The manual is currently accessible from the same web page of the tools, as referenced above. This same page also provides all of the training materials used in the PAT regional trainings, which can be used to train your own implementation team. Additional e-learning materials are being developed by the IRIS PAT team.

If a partner organization has specific questions during implementation, who can it contact for more information or help?

If you are required to implement a PAT for USAID reporting requirements, the PAT Help Desk is available to answer questions on all aspects of implementing the USAID Poverty Assessment Tools at pathelp@iris.econ.umd.edu. This is also the address you will use to send in your database (in Zipped/Compressed format ONLY) as part of the MRR process. Please note that due to funding limitations, the PAT Help Desk is ONLY available to those organizations who are required to implement a PAT for USAID reporting.

Is there a way to be notified about new country tools, updated training materials, or additional regional trainings?

The PATools listserv, originally used as a discussion forum during the development of the Poverty Assessment Tools project, is now operating to provide periodic updates on the availability of new tools, regional PAT trainings, and training materials. If you would like to join the listserv and receive updates, click “here”.

Will partner institutions report on the poverty status of only new clients? What clients should organizations be interviewing with these tools?

Partner institutions may interview either new or existing clients, but the sampling criteria must remain consistent throughout the process. Institutions will be required to report to MRR which type of clients, new or existing, were surveyed. The intent is to report on clients which most accurately represent the beneficiaries of USAID funding. Organizational partners should work with their USAID technical officer and the PAT Help Desk to ensure that the correct definition of clients/beneficiaries is being used in the sampling design.

What is the best practice for implementing a country tool survey in a local language?

The best way to maintain the accuracy of the assessment tools during translation is to ensure that the translation is as similar to the original version as possible. As described in the Tool Implementation Manual, the best way to accomplish this is to translate the tool into the desired language, and then translate it back into English. This process is an excellent way to ensure that meaning is not lost in the translation process. Translation is best accomplished before any interviewing from the final sample of clients begins; pre-testing of the questionnaire and implementation process on a small sample of clients is recommended. It would compromise the accuracy of the assessment tools to simply translate the English versions of the tools “on the spot” during an interview with a client, for any language or dialect.

Why do some indicators seem irrelevant in the areas where they must be asked?

Because each tool contains at least fifteen different indicators developed from nationally representative samples, it will often be the case that some of the indicators are not applicable in each part of the country. For example, the Uganda tool contains a question asking, “During the last seven days, for how many days was large fish served in a main meal eaten by the household?” It may seem irrelevant to ask whether a household ate large fish in areas of Uganda where even the wealthy do not eat large fish. If the goal of PAT development were to develop a standardized tool to assess poverty within such a region, such as Northern Uganda, the large fish question would almost certainly disappear as one of the best fifteen indicators for predicting poverty: it would fail to distinguish the “very poor” from the “not very poor” within Northern Uganda. However, this would still encourage the correct poverty prediction: the absence of large fish is associated with extreme poverty. The consumption of large fish has been found to be good indicator to separate “very poor” from “not very poor” for Uganda as a whole, and therefore contributes to the goal of the tool, which is national-level poverty assessment.

Can indicators be adapted or replaced?

In general, no. One way to think of this issue is to consider how a cake is made. A cake recipe consists of a particular combination of ingredients, none of which you would want to eat alone. You would not eat flour alone, nor baking soda, nor butter, etc., but you would happily consume the product of their combination using a good recipe. A PAT is made and used the same way: none of the indicators in the tool necessarily serves as a good indicator of extreme poverty on its own, but the identified set of indicators, properly combined, gives the desired result. Also, one must be careful with substitutions when baking a cake: adding something similar in color and texture instead of the required ingredient can yield unsavory, or even comic, results. The same principle holds for the quantities used of an ingredient. Similarly, the PAT poverty calculation is sensitive to substitutions among indicators used and changes in their units.

How should an interviewer handle a situation where the indicator is obviously irrelevant?

It is preferable to simply instruct the interviewer to fill in a zero or “no” when s/he already knows or can plainly see that the household does not possess or eat a particular item. An interviewer should be permitted to skip over questions when the answer is obvious, such as the possession of vacuum cleaners in mud huts, whether people ate only cassava in the last 7 days when their house is full of TVs, stereos and the like, or when members of the household serve the interviewer snacks. Some of the questions applied in very poor regions (ownership of a motorbike, a metal roof, etc.) will be out of place simply because the people are so much poorer than others in the country. There is no need to ask a question if the answer is obvious. It can be embarrassing for both the interviewer and interviewee to ask about something that poor people obviously do not have.

It is important to remember that we are not measuring relative poverty; we are measuring absolute poverty. Measuring relative poverty would entail comparing the households in one village to each other, but measuring absolute poverty is comparing the households in one village to households around the entire country.

How can USAID PATs be used for more than reporting to USAID?

All USAID-certified poverty assessment tools and accompanying training materials are freely available to any organization or individual to help measure extreme poverty at the household level. PATs are already being used in other research projects that focus on the depth of outreach to the very poor. In addition to measuring the prevalence of extreme poverty, the data collected using a PAT can be exported to other formats and analyzed to look for trends among the target population. Additional questions can also be added to the end of the PAT survey to augment how much is learned about the clients of a program.