Participatory Poverty Assessment

A Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) is an instrument for understanding poverty from the perspective of poor people themselves, using participatory methods to elicit their own definitions, experiences, and priorities rather than imposing externally fixed indicators. Pioneered by the World Bank in the 1990s and made famous by the multi-country 'Voices of the Poor' study, the PPA combines participatory rural appraisal tools with a deliberate concern to influence policy, complementing rather than replacing the quantitative household surveys on which official poverty measurement rests.