Poverty Score Card Survey

The fundamental basis of the People's Poverty Reduction Programme (PPRP) is to alleviate poverty, for this purpose the Poverty Scorecard which is recognized by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, IMF and the Federal Planning Commission has to be used as a census survey, (visiting all households) and situation analysis of target area to identify those poor households which are ordinarily excluded from social welfare initiatives, in order to provide them the products and services included in the project.

Originally PSC was developed by the Grameen Foundation USA and by Dr. Mark Schreiner, a Senior Scholar at the Centre for Social Development at the Washington University in St. Louis, America. The scorecard is comprised of two sets of indicators. One indicator reflects poverty risk, by measuring education level, residence and household size, while the other reflects the change in household poverty, by measuring household assets, transport assets, meat consumption, and sweet consumption. By using non-economic indicators.

The Poverty Score Card is thus a simple and practical tool to measure poverty at different levels i.e. household level, Deh level, Union Council level, Taluka level and District level. It is blind and neither the enumerator nor the respondent can interpret its results because it does not ask direct questions about incomes and expenditures.

The PSC uses 13 questions to evaluate the poverty levels of a household; questions which are easily verifiable. The PSC has the ability to categorise entire union councils and districts into different poverty bands, ( 0-11 Extremely poor/destitute, 12-18 Chronically poor, 19-23 Transitory poor, 24-100 Non poor.) making it easier to distinguish products for each band.

The Poverty Scorecard (PSC) data collection will be done by android application specifically designed to capture all PSC related information, which will then become a basis to register each member of the CO, VO and LSO in the online MIS. Use of the android technology will ensure 100% household coverage for PSC in the PPRP area and also targeting of the poor households for inclusion in the three tiered structure of CO, VO and LSO as well as for selection of households for various interventions including IGG, CIF, Vocational training and House construction etc.