Devising neutral tools for development decision-making: The Poverty Assessor

Pro-poor decision-making demands that the communication channels between development actors and the poor are strengthened. However, effective decision-making also requires that the complexities and inter-relationships between household livelihood, demographic, and economic factors are understood. Therefore, the following paper describes the design and implementation of the Poverty Assessor, a software programme to aid practitioners, policy makers and researchers in visualizing the direct poverty impacts of specific livelihood factors and events among populations of poor livestock keepers. The software enables users to profile individuals in relation to the national poverty line in each of the countries involved by selecting from a range of demographic and livelihood indicators. The tool operates by retrieving information from a database derived from the voices of 5,372 poor households in Kenya, India and Bolivia. The paper begins by offering a brief background to the issues involved and the creation of the tool. In the second section, results are presented utilizing examples from the Bolivian study set.