A simple technology for poverty-oriented project assessment

Abstract

The challenge confronting sponsors of aid is to design tools which will enable rational decisions to be made at lower financial and organisational cost than those which caused orthodox economic and social cost-benefit analysis to fail. This paper presents a framework for the assessment of distributional impact and illustrates the impact measurement tool and its method of calculation. This tool reconciles the requirements of low cost and reasonable accuracy. It focuses on those below the poverty line and recommends the guiding criterion of ‘poverty-elasticity of aid expenditure’.

Keywords:

• project assessment
• poverty relief
• cost-benefit analysis