Assessing Poverty Interventions: Conceptual, Methodological and Empirical Perspectives Relating to Property Rights Formalization in Rural Tanzania

This paper reports on our approach to the assessment of poverty interventions, specifically that of property rights formalization in rural Tanzania. Property rights formalization, or land titling, has been heavily funded premised in part on its purported ability to reduce poverty. In the view of its proponents, it has the potential to increase income through a rural household’s productive activities. Yet, independent evaluations of this poverty intervention are lacking. We contend that assessment of a poverty intervention should effectively encompass the intervention’s pathways that are expected to lead to poverty reduction. Our approach surveys households by village, the level at which land titling is implemented. We use a household income measure that we call imputed income, which conceptually and empirically captures a rural household’s productive activities. This is a simple and reliable metric that supports independent assessment of poverty reduction interventions, such as titling, by classifying the poor based on productive activities. It thereby lessens the need to use publicly available household income data generated for a different purpose or by agencies that might have a vested interest in demonstrating policy success or failure. To gauge the merit of our household income measure, we compare it to three other commonly used measures: reported income, consumption expenditure and household assets. The value of our approach is then demonstrated by relating change in poverty to change in title-deed ownership using ten years of data from ~2000 households in 40 villages in rural Tanzania. Our approach is a contribution to methodologies that evaluate poverty interventions and not to poverty measurement.