Initial Design Phase Study preparations began early 2003 with a literature review, internal meetings on the study concept note, and a series of five interdisciplinary research methodology workshops with World Bank and external experts from diverse disciplines, including Economics, Political Science, Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology. The workshops served multiple purposes, including specifying the research hypotheses, criteria for country and community selection, and data collection tools. A first workshop to discuss the study proposal was held in Cairo, Egypt during the Annual Meetings of the Global Development Network (GDN) in January 2003. Two additional international methodology workshops were held in London with the Development Planning Unit of University College, London, Overseas Development Institute, and DFID in May 2003 and at World Bank headquarters in July 2003 . | | Field Notes | Which category on the Ladder of Life is the hardest to escape from? Category 1 “because the poor are not trusted when it comes to borrowing money, they cannot think well, and they own nothing.” ― A 24 year-old woman, from the hamlet of Angsoka Temor, Palengaan Daja village, Pamekasan, East Java, Indonesia |
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Field Pilots Prior to the official launch of the study, draft data collection guidelines were developed and field tested in Ethiopia, India, Peru, Philippines and Romania in October and November of 2003. While all tools were tested numerous times in varied country contexts, two qualitative tools in particular required additional testing and refining: the Ladder of Life and Individual Life Stories. Ladder of Life opens with a small community group reaching agreement on overall trends in and leading factors affecting the prosperity of their community in the past ten years. The group then describes the number and characteristics of wellbeing categories in their community on a visual of a multi-step ladder. Five aspects distinguish this tool: (i) it provides a subjective and multidimensional examination of wellbeing; (ii) the number of wellbeing categories are not fixed; (iii) it covers a 10 to 15 year time period, hence it is possible to look at policy impacts; (iv) it examines reasons for movement up, down and stagnation at each category of wellbeing; and (v) it engages local people in classifying the status of households in their community now and ten years ago on the ladder. At the end of the activity, the community group places its own subjective poverty line as well as the official poverty line on the ladder visual. Ladder of Life from men’s focus group discussion, Janna, Bangladesh 6 | Large Businessmen
Chakuria/Matbor | This category consists of large businessmen (boro-babshai) who cultivate two crops and are normally wholesalers of grocery items. They do not face any serious problem if they incur a loss in business. Their children are post graduates and officers and their good political connections help them obtain export-import licenses. In addition, this category also includes the chakurias (those employed in NGO/govt./pvt service). They earn a monthly (badha taka) income, eat good food, do heavy shopping and save money in a bank. Finally, this category includes the matbors who sit on the salish (arbitration). "They may not be rich, but enjoy much honor, are intelligent and God gifted (Allah-r-dan). Even millionaires come to them for justice." | 5 | Farm Family | Most people in this category inherit land and hire labor for cultivation. They also engage in business, by selling and lending rice to the poor. They produce sufficient food grain that is enough for the next 2-3 years, have tractors for land tilling and have brick-built houses. Children of people from this category are doing good jobs and sending remittances from abroad which enable them to move up. | 4 | Small Businessmen
Chotto Babshai | They are involved in raw materials business, do less physical work and can run their families smoothly by making proper use of credit. They have tin-roofed houses and some also have tube-wells. This category includes people who are "intelligent, who know how and where to invest, who do not sell any good unpaid, and who have mutual understanding with wholesalers and mahajons (creditors)." Stability in market price is important for people to move up from this category. Those who failed to invest money properly and sold goods unpaid have fallen down to the din-mojoor level. | 3 | Small Farmer / Factory Worker
Chotto Krishok/ Chakur | People in this category have more than 50-70 units of cultivable land and cultivate vegetables three times round the year. They also have 1-2 cows, sell milk and get their children educated. These people “move up day by day” – normally those who do not have any prejudice of doing any kind of work, who also engage in livestock rearing, whose women work in factories, and whose children manage to get a job abroad. Says Abdur Rahman, "First of all you need willingness (aggroho) to do work, then you have to be laborious (porisrami) and you have to be trustworthy (bis-sahsi) among community members for getting any kind of help. Only then it is possible to make progress (unniti)." | 2 | Poor/Day Laborer
Garib/Din-mojoo | They have no cultivable land, and usually pull rickshwas and sell labor. They live hand to mouth (adha pet khai) and borrow money during the monsoons due to joblessness. They have high rates of illiteracy, are less aware and have big families due to lack of knowledge on family planning. Their voices are not valued in the salish (local council). Those who are laborious, who are willing to work hard, and have honesty and good acceptance in the market can move up. Those who have more than one income source or more than one income earner in the family can move up. However, for most it is tough. Din-mojoor Joynal says, "The number of my family members is five and I earn 40-50 taka per day. I just run my family thele-thule (in a miserable manner). I only save 10 taka per day for household consumption during my sickness. It is too tough to move up." | 1 | Beggars/Disabled
Vikkuk/ Protibandhi | They are the physically disabled, completely dependent on others’ donation. They are mostly landless and have houses with leaked roofs, made of straw, reed and plastic paper. This category also consists of women – widows and those abandoned and divorced, with no children to support them. Most are unable to work due to age and chronic illness. Movement from this level is tough. One participant says, "Begging is a kind of addiction. If anyone gets addicted to begging, it hard to leave even when they are a little able to move up." |
The tool was experimented with over a period of a year in different cultural contexts. The instrument builds on previous work and takes it further, with five studies in particular providing inspiration. Participatory poverty assessments conducted in Kenya (Narayan 1996) and Tanzania (Narayan 1997) involved community groups in reaching agreement on multi-dimensional descriptions of categories of well-being, and then sorting households in the village into the different well-being categories and marking them on a community drawn map. The sorting provided a distribution of the households in the different categories based on local people’s perceptions, and the household list was used to draw a subsample for interviews. An early brainstorming workshop on Moving Out of Poverty in 2003 discussed Cantril's10 step Self-Anchoring Ladder (Cantril 1965) as well as the Stages of Progress tool developed by Anirudh Krishna (2004 and 2005). The latter engages local groups in examining well-being groups by expenditure patterns and explores changes in household status over a period of 25 years. The study design was also inspired by work in Malawi where community groups sorted households around levels of food security (Barahona and Levy 2003). Life Stories. The second data collection tool requiring additional testing was the Individual Life Story. There are many different ways of doing life stories, and the tool evolved based on the needs of the study and some requirements for comparability. The interview covers five themes: migration history; occupational history; financial history; social, cultural and psychological history; and educational history. Trend lines are created for each thematic area and annotated with ratings from minus to plus five to describe the impact of key events on overall wellbeing. The trend lines and ratings provide subjective information on life’s ups and downs along different dimensions and enrich the understanding of factors and processes that come together to help and hinder individual mobility. The interview concludes with the respondent creating a consolidated trend line to illustrate their overall wellbeing over the last ten years. Excerpts from the Life Story of Mbaye Niang, Mover, Thiel, Senegal 
Migration History | A: | Born in Canbel. “Our family was not poor but the neighborhood was living in misery. To show some respect to others we limited our food to lakh (millet porridge) and couscous. What is more, we had no contact with the rest of the world.” (-3) | | B: | Family moves to Thiel, village famous for availability of land and soil fertility. “In Thiel, I was in full bloom. I could see vehicles and go wherever I wanted.” (+2) | | C: | Presently he says that thanks to God, he feels good in Thiel and his trade is going well. (+3) |
Occupational History | A: | Begins stock breeding and trading of animals. “It was a returning activity and I could provide for the family needs.” (+3) | | B: | Gives up stock breeding to devote himself to farming, but says “not a good idea because the rainfall was not constant.” (+2) | | C: | Has a good crop. Saves 80,000 F CFA. A well-off person in the village rents him a store and gives him goods on credit. “With commerce my life improved. Stock breeding had helped me learn the working of the profession.” (+3) | | D: | Buys out his brother’s shop. Thanks to his good management, now one of the biggest traders in Thiel (+4) |
Economic History | A: | Acquires a horse and a cart “It helped me a lot during this period as I was smuggling goods.” (+4) | | B: | Purchases house furniture for his first wife’s chamber (+3) | | C: | Buys two sheep for breeding (+4) | | D: | Buys and breeds a cow to sell it for higher benefit (+4) | | E/F: | Has a good crop (+3); but in the same year loses ten sheep (-3) | | G: | Buys his brother’s store (+4) | | H/I: | Furnishes bedroom of second wife (+3). Same year, customs foreclose some of his goods. “I didn’t have the required documents, but it barely affected me.” (-1) | | J: | Buys a TV set for his family “Thanks to that my children didn’t have to go to the neighbors to watch TV” (+2) | | Presently, Mbaye says “My money doesn’t sleep. I invest it in trading and animals breeding”. In case of an unexpected event, he will be able to sell some animals to face the problems. |
Social History | A: | Childhood marked by affection and a strict education. “I felt easy with my brothers.” (+2) | | B: | Buys a horse famous for its strength. “Everybody admired it and I was proud of it.” (+4) | | C: | Marries his first wife (+4) | | D: | Baptism of his first son “It was during the event that I realized that I had a lot of friends in Thiel.” (+5) | | E: | The horse that he so loves dies. “It left something in my heart.” (-4) | | F: | His father dies (-5) | | G: | Marries for the second time; recovers his joy. “It was big celebration but the feast was not as big as when I was getting married for the first time.” (+2) |
Education History | A: | Attends Koranic school from 1970-82. “That was very difficult as the teacher was severe on us. But presently I thank God for the school because it molded my character and enabled me to face any test.” (+2 to +2) |
Overall Well-being After two years of negative well-being due to two successive bad crops, Mbaye got back on his feet with commerce. In 1997, he had annual revenue of 300,000 F CFA and bought out his brother’s store. Since that year, Mbaye has been on a rising curve. The success can be attributed to his trading and also the revenues drawn from stock breeding, a side activity. He considers his good management and seriousness as also helping him to rise up. |
Methodology reviews. The first review meeting of the study design involved academics from Harvard; Cornell; Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex; and World Bank staff in December 2003. A second meeting was held during the annual meetings of the GDN in New Delhi, India in January 2004, and engaged 45 developing country researchers, primarily economists and political scientists, in providing detailed feedback on the research design. Additional rounds of pilots of the qualitative methods were conducted in Peru and India in the summer of 2004. A Methodology Guide was developed to orient country research teams to the study. It includes discussion of the overall purpose of the study, the basic concepts, sampling techniques and ten data collection tools, including how to conduct a workshop with national policy makers. The guide has been translated into Spanish and French. Guidance to country teams. With the methodology completed, five regional training workshops were then conducted for the country research teams. Workshops were held in Bangkok, Thailand in November 2004; Dakar, Senegal in January 2005; New Delhi, India in March 2005; Mexico City, Mexico in April 2005; and Jakarta, Indonesia in May 2005. Country-level workshops were also carried out in each of the study countries to finalize the country research designs and train fieldworkers in the study methodology. In January 2006, team leaders from sixteen of the Moving Out of Poverty study countries were joined by eleven senior international experts from the fields of economics, sociology and political science for an intensive six-day workshop in St. Petersburg, Russia in collaboration with GDN. The workshop featured reporting on initial country findings interwoven with rich discussions on hypothesis development and analysis of the qualitative and quantitative datasets collected for the study. In addition to these events the Moving Out of Poverty global team provides ongoing technical backstopping to country teams. Study Scope and Design |  | | |
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