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All of the replications under CASHPOR have followed that basic principle. We have spent a lot of effort trying to adapt the Grameen approach to identifying the poor to other conditions in other countries in the region.... We feel we have, now, a very cost-effective way of identifying the poor that works in most conditions throughout Asia-with some adaptation always necessary. But the basic tool, which I will describe as the housing index, holds from China to Vietnam to The Philippines, Indonesia, North and South India, Bangladesh, and so forth. We have moved away a bit from Grameen's targeting, which involves a household interview, because we feel a household interview is too expensive and produces information of questionable reliability-validity-especially if you focus on household income.... So we have found an indicator that we think, in most cases, enables us to identify about 80 percent of the poor very quickly. And that is what we call the house index.... There are three dimensions of the house, and we can look at it from the roadside. We don't have to conduct any interviews. We just go up and down the lanes in the village and map the houses which appear to be qualified. We look at the size, we look at the physical condition or building materials, and we look at the material of the roof.
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Now, there is one major limitation of this house index, which I should mention. And that is in communities where there is an effective government housing program, such as many parts of India now.... Then you can have very poor people living in so-called pucca houses (modern brick, cement, and concrete houses). But they have nothing else. So it doesn't work where there is an effective government housing program for the poor. For those cases we have found it very useful to use the PRA method, the Participatory Rural Assessment method, for wealth ranking. We bring the whole village together to find out who are the very poor, who are the not-so-poor, who are the non-poor, through participatory methods....
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First the representative of each household lists their major assets (e.g., land, house, large farm animals, farm equipment, etc.), with their current values. These are recorded on cards, one for each household. Then the name of each household is read out and the villagers are asked to say to which of three piles it should be added: not-so-poor, poor, or very poor. In cases of dispute, the asset list is read out and a final decision is reached by consensus.
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