USAID Poverty Assessment Tools

The Poverty Tools listed below have been certified (approved) by USAID. These tools are now part of the public domain and may be downloaded and implemented by anyone. Additional tools for other countries will be made available as they are completed and certified by USAID. Cambodia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Liberia are the next countries scheduled for tool development.

Tools and Data Entry Templates (Last Updated April 2008)

To download files, right click on the link and select "Save Target As." After saving to your hard drive, the template file must be "unzipped" (decompressed) and then opened only from within the Epi Info program which can be downloaded free of charge from the CDC website.

The performance of each country tool in predicting extreme poverty can be found in the document, “Accuracy Results for Poverty Assessment Tool Countries.”

*These three tools were developed by USAID in consultation with the Grameen Foundation. All other tools were developed by USAID through a contract with the IRIS Center at the University of Maryland.

**FY = the first fiscal year during which USAID partners are required to implement a PAT in a country. See below for further instructions on who is required to implement.

Who must Report?

All implementing partners who (1) work in a country with a certified Poverty Assessment Tool, and (2) spent at least $100,000 in USAID funding (obligations) during the current fiscal year to support microenterprise development activities in that country, must use that certified tool to measure the share of their clients who are very poor and report the results to USAID through the Microenterprise Results Reporting (MRR) system. This funding threshold includes microenterprise activities carried out as part of other development efforts, including PEPFAR, ACI, and Title II. Implementing partners affected by this requirement will be tentatively identified based on funding received in the previous fiscal year, and on current-year funding projections in the Foreign Assistance Coordination and Tracking System (FACTS).

For FY 2007, this requirement applies to implementing partners from the 17 countries listed in the table above with FY2007 in the last column.

Additional country tools for FY 2008 reporting will be added to this page through June 30, 2008, so please check back here to see which countries are added for FY2008 reporting requirements.

When Should the Tool be Applied and the Results Reported?

Beginning in FY 2008, implementing partners will be required to apply the Poverty Assessment Tools by the end of the Fiscal Year in which the funds were received–that is, by the end of September–and to include the results in their regular reporting to MRR.

In FY 2007 ONLY, poverty assessments completed by the end of December 2007 and reported to MRR will be accepted as representative of the poverty status of the partner’s clients in FY 2007.

Data Processing

Each survey tool comes with a data entry template to be used to process the data collected from the client interviews. The data processing is done with a statistical program called Epi Info. (see link below) Once the program is downloaded (free of charge), installed, and opened, then the data entry template can be "unzipped" (decompressed), opened from within the Epi Info software, and then used for data entry and analysis. To download the Epi Info statistical program (based in MS Access .mdb format), click here. * If you have an earlier version of Epi Info, you should be sure to update it to the most recent version available on the website!