How Well Can We Target Resources with “Quick-and-Dirty†Data? : Empirical Results from Cambodia

Poverty reduction is a top priority for international organizations, governments and non-governmental organizations. The aid resources available for poverty reduction are, however, severely constrained in many countries. Minimizing the leakage of aid resources to the non-poor is a key to maximize poverty reduction with the limited amount of resources available. One way to minimize such leakage is to target resources geographically. That is, policymakers can move resources to the poorest part of the country. Geographic targeting can be quite effective when poverty is unevenly distributed across the country, and this proves to be the case in many countries. This paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we summarize the SAE poverty mapping Cambodia. Section 3, discusses the methodology and dataset we used to create an MWBI poverty map in Cambodia. Section 4, we describe the CCDB. In section 5, we compare the SAE poverty map and the MWBI poverty map as well as the CCDB in Cambodia. In section 6, we consider the implications for geographic targeting, and section 7 concludes.