Quantifying the Very Poor

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 beneficiaries**, and to require its microenterprise implementing partners to use those tools to measure and report the share of their beneficiaries who are very poor. Each USAID-developed Poverty Assessment Tool (PAT) 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 beneficiaries who are very poor.

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 beneficiaries who are very poor, and must report the results to USAID through the Microenterprise Results Reporting (MRR) system.

The application of the Poverty Assessment Tools for MRR was suspended in late 2010, pending a review of compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act. As of May 2011, the use of PATs was reinstated by USAID, and eligible partners will report on their poverty outreach in FY11 using the tools.

This site is intended to inform and help organizations as they apply the Poverty Assessment Tools. All USAID-certified poverty asessment tools and accompanying training materials are freely available to any user to help measure extreme poverty at the household level.

Note: Many documents on this site are saved as Acrobat PDFs. To get the free reader follow the link here.

**'Beneficiaries' includes the employees of clients, so Enterprise Development/BDS programs should include the employees of their clients in their sampling plan.

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