The Poverty Stoplight (PS) seeks to activate the potential of families to eliminate multidimensional poverty beyond traditional income measures through a self-evaluation tool. PS is used by communities, businesses and governments to support families in assessing their poverty levels and implementing practical solutions, empowering the poor to be architects and protagonists in the process of eliminating poverty.
Innovation Summary
Innovation Overview
There are 1.3 billion poor people in the world whose capabilities are thwarted by inequality and who are not allowed to enjoy the freedoms necessary to achieve their human potential. According to various sources families across the globe are facing the following challenges:
2 billion+ people live on less than $3.20 per day, while 783 million people live on less than $1.90 per day in extreme poverty (World Bank)
815 million people worldwide do not have enough food to eat (FAO)
800 million+ people lack adequate access to clean drinking water. Diarrhea caused by inadequate drinking water, sanitation, and hand hygiene kills an estimated 500,000 people every year globally (WHO)
Almost 1 billion people live without electricity (World Bank)
Over 800 million people have not completed primary education and nearly 1 billion people are considered to be illiterate (World Bank)
Solutions presented by various organizations, companies and governments attempt to solve these problems, but the complex nature of poverty makes it difficult for one entity to work toward real lasting change.
Traditional ways of measuring and combating poverty face certain challenges when designing quality responses. First, poverty has many more dimensions than simply insufficient income. A family may have an income above the national poverty line yet still be poor due to a lack of decent housing, clean water, access to education, quality health care or other requirements for a decent life. Second, poverty does not affect families uniformly. Each family is poor in its own way and therefore has a different set of poverty-related problems to resolve in order to overcome poverty. Third, the main protagonists in eliminating poverty must be the poor themselves. Institutions, however far-sighted or well-funded, do not have sufficient insight into the poverty-related problems of individual families or adequate resources to permanently eliminate poverty on their behalf. Moreover, an individual must adopt certain behaviors and attitudes to overcome poverty in all its dimensions and to maintain a standard of living that is not poor. Finally, a poverty-elimination strategy must be scalable, which implies that it must cost very little to implement and, ultimately, must be financially self-sustaining. Taking these points into consideration, Fundación Paraguaya (FP) created the Poverty Stoplight.
The Poverty Stoplight is an innovative tool used globally to support individuals, households and communities to measure and take action against multidimensional poverty. It is both a metric and a methodology: through a visual survey using photographs and text to describe each scenario, families self-assess their level of poverty in 50 indicators grouped into 6 dimensions of poverty: Income & Employment, Health & Environment, Housing & Infrastructure, Education & Culture, Organization & Participation and Interiority & Motivational. Each indicator is defined as Red (extreme poverty), Yellow (poverty) or Green (not poverty). Staff then works directly with families to design plans and prioritize action to address their greatest challenges. Actions are not dictated by FP or by FP staff, but rather innovated with the family based on existing resources and partnerships in their community. Follow up surveys are taken to measure the impact of these actions and to reevaluate family priorities. The data collected through the Poverty Stoplight methodology is easily shared with various stakeholders, and has proven to be useful across organizations, including for NGOs and businesses, and the public sector.
With thousands of families in Paraguay having self-diagnosed their level of poverty and prioritized indicators; data produced by the Poverty Stoplight is proving to be an extremely useful resource for the Paraguayan government at both the local and national level; additionally, the data can be used to inform international indexes, making the national context comparable internationally. The geo-referenced data produced by the Poverty Stoplight gives a snapshot overview of prioritized indicators and challenges that communities identified and act on. Furthermore, through individualized coaching, families are informed of public services available to them in the community and encouraged to actively seek these services. PS also being applied through the Paraguayan Ministry of Justice for example, where prison inmates who work during the day create their life maps. They are accompanied throughout the process of improving the indicators they prioritize. Currently, PS is also being carried out through the national government volunteer program - AROVIA. Volunteers work directly with families to coach families on their life maps. The Poverty Stoplight should become the reference of choice for participatory poverty assessments and as such can help design larger-scale development initiatives, implemented by the government, based on data taken from the beneficiaries themselves.
Innovation Description
What Makes Your Project Innovative?
It is directed by the families, giving the poor a voice in the definition of poverty and instigating behavioral change through mentorship that empowers them to be architects of solutions to their biggest challenges
It goes further than traditional multidimensional poverty metrics by analyzing the family’s perception of their ability to change their situation and their motivation to take action
It breaks down the overwhelming concept of multidimensional poverty into smaller, manageable problems solved through simple interventions, making the "invisible" manifestations of poverty visible through simple, understandable indicators
It helps generate actions and channel existing resources by promoting creation and collaboration among all stakeholders
It spurs dialogue and collaborative action between individuals, communities, and organizations across the public and private sectors that redistributes the power to affect change equally among stakeholders
What is the current status of your innovation?
Identify Problems: PS discovers new and different ways that poverty affects families, opening up new opportunities for innovation
Generate Ideas: Once the data is collected, families work with the PS team to design and implement solutions using available goods and services in their communities, or innovating new ones
Develop Proposals: PS team constantly develops proposals to continue scaling up the model. From funding proposals to agreements to offer technical assistance to replicating organization, the PS is attracting much attention
Implementation: PS is always in implementation: 100+ businesses in Paraguay, 12 hubs guiding 218 organization in 23 countries. Technology makes replication and adaptation even easier to scale
Evaluation: With key partners PS team focuses on validating/improving the methodology through evaluation, comparing results at every level
Diffuse Lessons: PS implementers make up a global PS network, sharing best practices and constantly improve implementation
Innovation Development
Collaborations & Partnerships
The Skoll Foundation, Benetech, CAF - The Development Bank of Latin America - support upgrades to technological platform and evolution of the methodology
Peery Foundation- financed 5-year Poverty scale-up strategy co-created w/ IMAGO Global Grassroots
OPHI - review indicators and match to international index
US universities help with audiovisual, impact studies and adaptation of the tool to different contexts.
Actively working with 100+ public sector organizations to implement solutions
Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries
Citizens: The main protagonists, citizens are families that take the survey and work with FP to innovate and implement solutions
Government officials: FP works with government officials at all levels to implement PS in Paraguay, including SENAVITAT
Companies:Empresas sin Pobreza. Over 100 (20 new in 2018) have implemented the PS in their organizations with employees,
Civil Society Organizations: Globally, civil society organizations implement the Poverty Stoplight with their beneficiaries
Innovation Reflections
Results, Outcomes & Impacts
Since its inception in 2013, 55,500 families have taken the Poverty Stoplight survey worldwide. Through strategic partnerships, the Poverty Stoplight is implemented with private businesses, government entities, and other nonprofit organizations worldwide. Through 13 international hubs, 218 organizations across 23 countries are implementing it alongside their interventions, and the results have been used to design and implement contests, workshops, and events that reached an additional 200,000+ people worldwide. Each partner is in a different phase of implementation, from adaptation of the indicators, to resource mapping, to field implementation of baseline surveys, to follow-up surveys/analysis. In Paraguay, 100 public/private businesses have used the tool since 2013 to improve the quality of life of their employees, reaching 15,000+ employees and their families.
Challenges and Failures
Interesting insights emerge from experience implementing the Poverty Stoplight. For instance, poor families often pick priorities that are not what we were expecting, strongly asserting the importance of participatory programming. An example for a more challenging insight is that a recent program evaluation showed that the Poverty Stoplight program is particularly effective for families who suffer from moderate poverty, while there is some room for improving the program's effectiveness for those who suffer several extreme deprivations. Proof of this is shown on the first results gathered from the report on year 1 Cerrito Project, where overall progress was not evident, as for families in extreme poverty is harder to overcome most indicators. This result may also be due to the change there has been in the indicators of the Poverty Stoplight. The baseline survey in Cerrito used the previous version of the PS indicators, while the second round of surveys used the new aligned indicators.
Conditions for Success
Rethinking resources: Acknowledging that resources already exist within families, companies and other sectors and the challenge is how we can make better use of those resources in development.
Rethinking the role of the families: They should be the real protagonists of poverty elimination.
Technology, access and development are crucial to better reaching families.
The participation of different sectors in actively eliminating poverty is very important. The public sector must not be the sole responsible party for poverty elimination, but a key player.
Replication
What started as a local endeavor in Paraguay has quickly expanded internationally. The Poverty Stoplight strategy is scalable and replicable because it can be adapted to any country. Every country will have its own definition of what it means to be not poor and will accordingly adapt the indicators. This flexibility means that the Poverty Stoplight embraces the extreme diversity within communities and individual families.
Our Scale-up Strategy envisions the creation of Poverty Stoplight HUBS in 50 countries by 2021, which will serve as focal points for the dissemination of the tool in their country. We aim to have 200,000 Stoplight users by 2021.
Lessons Learned
Poverty is multidimensional and involves subjective indicators, which are equally important.
Every family has the potential to overcome poverty.
Each family is poor in their own way.
Indicators must be adapted to reflect the local context, as achievable goals are key to empowering families to take action.
Multiple stakeholders can have an active role and be committed, and they have an important role to eliminate poverty, not just the government.
Bureaucracy and lack of resources translates into the inability of governments to implement the methodology. Governments have a very crucial role in our framework but other organisations are more efficient in working directly with impoverished families.
Organisations like ours or private companies can have a direct and significant positive effect in eliminating poverty worldwide.
Headcount is good for metrics, but when providing result-oriented solutions, families need to be your unit of analysis and intervention.
Technology can help us reach millions of people and manage multidimensionality by allowing families to self-select subjective indicators that are not observable.
Project Pitch
Status:
- Implementation - making the innovation happen
- Evaluation - understanding whether the innovative initiative has delivered what was needed
- Diffusing Lessons - using what was learnt to inform other projects and understanding how the innovation can be applied in other ways
Innovation provided by:
Date Published:
24 October 2011