Testimonials

The practitioners and organizations represented on this page are committed to poverty measurement for the sake of data-driven decision making when designing programs for poverty alleviation.

Tom Adams, Director of Impact at Acumen

“PPI is fast becoming one of the most effective tools for measuring social change quickly and efficiently. Critical to Acumen’s work in poverty alleviation is the need to measure and validate how far our investments can go in reaching and improving the lives of the poor. PPI helps us to track that as far as we possibly can.”

Product review by Piroska Bisits Bullen at Tools4Dev

“The PPI® is an fantastic creation... Although there are many other tools available to measure poverty, the PPI® tool is particularly easy to use, well documented, and is already customised and translated for a wide range of countries.” (Read the full review of the PPI at Tools4Dev.)

Larry Reed, Director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign

“The Microcredit Summit recommends that MFIs use a poverty measurement tool, and we recommend the PPI because it’s the most developed and has the best support, including a mobile-based tool for data collection and analysis.  Fostering movement out of poverty requires first understanding the poverty level of your clients, making adjustments to products, services and operations accordingly, and then tracking changes in client outcomes.  The PPI is a really powerful tool for knowing your clients and making sure your organization is addressing the needs and challenges they face.”

Frances Sinha, Managing Director of EDA Rural Systems Private Limited and Technical Committee Chair of Truelift

“In development – and now in Impact investing – we often talk about serving poor people and poverty reduction. The PPI is a practical tool that helps us  to track whether we are indeed serving poor people, and seeing progress out of poverty. It helps us to do this by  simplifying the measurement (the complications of trying to calculate per capita household expenditure) and enabling us to benchmark against specified poverty lines of a country. So we can apply the tool routinely as part of ongoing monitoring of operations, and the data can be analysed to show to what extent we are reaching say the poorer 20% or  40% of the population, or those below the ‘$1.25 line’. In EDA we include the PPI as part of our training programmes with MFIs and other development practitioners, we also apply the tool as part of our development research.  By applying the tool over time, practitioners can track change in the poverty levels of their clients. Whether there is such progress or not depends on the effectiveness of a programme intervention as well as other factors.”

Dr. Aris Alip, Managing Director at CARD MRI

“Now we have objective poverty data on our clients thanks to the PPI and Grameen Foundation's guidance on analysis; the results challenge us to do better. The PPI has become the conscience of the institution.”

Michelle Kaffenberger, Research Manager at InterMedia

“We use the PPI because of its conciseness and simplicity—we have used long, consumption-based modules in the past for determining poverty, but they are too time-consuming and cumbersome to be practical in most of our surveys.  The PPI allows us to calculate a poverty level with 10 short, easy-to-answer questions, which allows us more time to ask other questions needed for our research.”

Genzo Yamamoto, Director of Knowledge Management for Opportunity International

“An index that has become widely accepted among organizations working to empower poor clients has been the PPI—a quick-and-easy survey... The use of the PPI in the recent research allowed us to use a consistent and industry-recognized methodology when examining the impact of our agricultural program.” (Taken from the blog article Measuring the Impact of Agricultural Finance.)

Caitlin Scott, Program and Projects Manager and Tori Barnett, Marketing and Communications Manager at Friendship Bridge

“The PPI has become an essential tool in the monitoring and evaluation system at Friendship Bridge. Not only is the information used to guide organizational strategy, but the comprehensive system is used to carefully track social performance and alert staff to future program changes and enhancements. Ultimately, this allows Friendship Bridge to provide the right products and services to keep clients advancing along the Continuum to affect change on a community scale.” (Taken from the blog article How Poverty Data Influences Strategy at Friendship Bridge.)

Sasha Dichter, Chief Innovation Officer at Acumen

“The idea is to use technology, married with smart frameworks like the PPI, to make it easier to get data and insights about real impacts on the ground. I don’t know what these data will tell us, but I do know that the pursuit of easy-to-collect, quantitative data will be a first step towards differentiating the social impact strategies of the myriad impact investors in the marketplace.” (Taken from Sasha's blog article Quantitative Social Metrics for Impact Investing.)

Kuria Wanjau, Savings Group Project Manager, FSD Kenya

“Before using PPI, we couldn't tell the poverty profile of those we were reaching with savings groups (SGs). After we started using the PPI, we were able to tell who were reaching and were surprised that we weren’t reaching the very poor. This knowledge helped us to design the next phase of the project differently in order to reach poorer members. The PPI has been a useful monitoring tool. It has helped validate the level of success in pro-poor outreach. We are using the PPI data for project design, monitoring, and reporting.”