A Simple Poverty Scorecard for Morocco

Mark Schreiner

Center for Social Development, Washington University in Saint Louis

(March 2007)

This paper uses a national survey to construct an easy-to-use, objective scorecard that estimates the likelihood that a person in Morocco has expenditure below a given poverty line. The scorecard uses 10 simple indicators that field workers can quickly collect and easily verify. Poverty scores can be computed on paper in the field in real time. With 90-percent confidence, a household’s estimated poverty likelihood is accurate to +/–12 percentage points, and a group’s estimated overall poverty rate is accurate to +/–1.6 percentage points. The poverty scorecard can help development programs to target services, track changes in poverty over time, and report on poverty rates.