Evans School Policy Analysis & Research Group (EPAR)

Key Takeaways

• A survey of poverty indicators surfaced 139 candidates, of which 36 were ultimately selected for inclusion in the study based on indicator construction, use, and timeliness.

• The selected 36 poverty indicators relied primarily on 26 data sources, mainly household surveys and administrative government data.

• Most indicators relied on household survey data and used multidimensional indices to comprehensively measure poverty, aside from poverty line and poverty gap measures which relied exclusively on income and consumption.

• Indicators or indicator components were typically based on quantitative estimates of income or consumption, although an increasing number of measurements are instead classifying households according to deprivation of assets, food, or access to services and basic infrastructure.

• Overall, critics find that an emphasis on poverty line measurements has led to an incomplete understanding of poverty’s prevalence and trends over the last several decades (UN Special Rapporteur, 2020).

• No single indicator dominates on considerations of reliability, dimensions, depth or intensity, comparability, etc., but rather each measure involves tradeoffs.

• If the goal is to increase the utility of commonly used indicators, including those considering multiple dimensions of poverty, then investments focused on expanding the coverage, frequency, or scope of nationally representative household surveys is a necessary first step.

• Making cross-country comparisons using any poverty indicator runs the risk of using a common metric based on different data sources and collected in different years that may not fully reflect a household’s welfare. Indices which include multiple subcomponents may be more holistic, but even less reliable as the number of components requiring data increases.

Suggested citation:

Landscape Review of Poverty Measures. EPAR Technical Report #424 (2022). Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, University of Washington. Retrieved <Day Month Year> from https://epar.evans.uw.edu/research

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) is a development framework which focuses on the capacities, skills and social resources of people and their communities, rather than initially focusing on the needs, deficiencies, constraints and problems of a community.1 This document contains three sections. The first section summarizes several papers which either (1) apply ABCD or similar asset-focused development frameworks in a rural/agricultural context and to development in Sub-Saharan Africa, or (2) provide general guidance on the implementation of ABCD approaches to development. The second section provides more detail on how Oxfam and the Coady International Institute have applied ABCD in Ethiopian communities.
Finally, in order to provide an example of how ABCD might be applied to a Foundation project, the third section briefly notes how an ABCD strategy might differ from the Foundation’s proposed constraints-based Bihar strategy.

The purpose of this literature review is to provide qualitative and quantitative examples of technologies, constraints and incentives for efficient waste treatment and reuse in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.  We present relevant case studies and expert observations and experiences on the nutrient content in urine and feces, contaminants frequently found in untreated sludge and wastewater, waste treatment technologies that may be relevant for low-income countries, risks associated with waste reuse, benefits to resource recovery in agriculture. We further discuss reasons for waste treatment failures, including urbanization, observations on challenges with market-driven reuse in less developed countries, and examples of net-positive energy facilities in Europe and the United States. Much of the evidence presented in the literature relates to wastewater treatment processes or the sludge produced from wastewater treatment as opposed to untreated fecal sludge.  However, examples of risks, failures, and opportunities for raw sludge treatment and reuse are discussed when available.  In some cases, empirical evidence or case studies were not available for developing countries and alternatives are presented.  Overall we found the empirical evidence on waste treatment and reuse in developing countries is quite thin.