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Poverty Probability Index

The Poverty Probability Index (PPI), formerly the Progress out of Poverty Index, is a simple, country-specific scorecard that estimates the likelihood that a household is living below a given poverty line. Developed by Mark Schreiner and disseminated first by the Grameen Foundation and later by Innovations for Poverty Action, it reduces poverty measurement to ten easy-to-answer, verifiable questions about household characteristics. The answers produce a score from 0 to 100, which a calibration table converts into the probability that the household falls below national or international poverty lines — a low-cost alternative to a full consumption survey for organizations that need to track the poverty profile of the people they serve.

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Sources

  1. Schreiner, M. (2016). The Poverty Probability Index (PPI): A Brief on Calculating Annual Poverty Rates and Movement Across a Poverty Line. Innovations for Poverty Action / PovertyIndex.org. link
  2. Schreiner, M. (2002). Scoring: The Next Breakthrough in Microcredit? CGAP Occasional Paper 7. Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, Washington, DC. link

How to cite this page

ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Poverty Probability Index (PPI, formerly Progress out of Poverty Index). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/development-studies/progress-out-of-poverty-index

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ScholarGatePoverty Probability Index (Poverty Probability Index (PPI, formerly Progress out of Poverty Index)). Retrieved 2026-06-24 from https://scholargate.app/en/development-studies/progress-out-of-poverty-index · Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20539026