Developing Income Proxy Models for use by the USAID Mission in Kenya: A Technical Report

Abstract

Introduction: Governments, donors, and NGOs in developing countries spend billions of dollars every year on efforts to improve the well-being of rural households. Most of these interventions have the ultimate goal of reducing poverty, and many include specific objectives of increasing household incomes from specific activities such as microenterprise, cash cropping, food cropping, or livestock. Since an accurate assessment of these outcomes is costly and time consuming, much research has attempted to identify simple indicators which are correlated with the variables of interest. The income proxy models developed in Kenya are one method in this large and expanding toolbox of low cost approaches to monitoring otherwise complex indicators of household welfare.