Household Economic Vulnerability Tool Indicator Guide

PEPFAR implementers are interested in a standardized, rapid tool to capture economic vulnerability. However, economic vulnerability is a complicated concept to measure (Kamanou & Morduch, 2002). It requires estimating a future state of economic status based on measuring known risks as well as known protective factors, or sources of resilience. Although there is a robust literature on the sources of economic or livelihood vulnerability emerging from the Sustainable Livelihoods tradition, there are too many individual sources of risk for a single measure to quantify them all. It is therefore unlikely that a single vulnerability scale can be developed to capture a broad definition of economic vulnerability in the context of HIV (Burke et al., 2016).

Rather than attempting to develop an economic vulnerability scale for cross-contextual use, ASPIRES has developed a standardized, rapid monitoring tool for assessing economic vulnerability at the household level, tailored to capture key indicators of interest to PEPFAR. To ensure local validity and cross-contextual comparability, the tool is based on the perceptions of the heads of household or adult OVC caregivers using the local context as a reference point.