Combined Methods in Poverty Analysis: Experiences from Namibia

This paper explores differences in the findings on poverty in Namibia from a series participatory poverty assessments and a household survey on household income and expenditure. The authors find that the main conclusions from these research processes appear plausible even if they point to diverging paths of poverty. These results are attributed to methodological challenges and especially to different perceptions about the determinants of poverty that each approach conveys. Using a Q-Squared approach we illustrate that when definitions of poverty based on the perceptions raised in the qualitative assessments are used on the quantitative data then the results tend to converge. One particularly interesting finding is that those identified as poor using the official poverty measure, established explicitly to capture deprivation in consumption expenditure, have higher average levels of consumption expenditure than a combined Q-Squared measure based exclusively on non-monetary criteria.