Poverty Stoplight
Poverty Stoplight is an approach that helps people progress out of poverty by empowering them to understand and map their own choices. It encourages households to participate and own their journeys out of poverty, and provides a clear line of sight of how to get there; at the same time allowing organisations delivering support to measure progress against their programme objectives.
How it works
- The tool uses stoplight colours, photographs, tables, electronic devices, and simple software developed for Android devices to create innovative maps that enable the participants to see and understand the ways in which they are poor.
- The surveys assess poverty levels using 50 indicators grouped into six dimensions of poverty. For each indicator, there is a picture and definition for very poor (red), poor (orange) and not poor (green).
- Beneficiaries are surveyed when they join the programme (baseline), after 12 months and again after 24 months.
- Trained facilitators meet with the family in their home and together they assess their current situation by selecting the appropriate colour on the tablet for each indicator.
- The result is a Poverty Stoplight scorecard that is easy to understand and use in follow-up processes. The results empowers each low-income family to reflect, prioritise and plan how to resolve the poverty-related problems that affects the family, with the assistance of organisations that have competencies relating to each indicator, via a referral pathway.
- It also allows us to monitor our impact on the families in our programs, to identify collaboration partners required in the geographical area we are working and tailor our programs to the needs of the community.