Lifting oneself out of poverty alone is a nearly impossible task, but agency in the effort towards economic mobility can be a powerful tool. At the Poverty Stoplight, a Paraguay-based organization working to help families discover practical and innovative solutions in overcoming poverty, self-awareness is a key philosophy. The organization’s Stoplight tool offers a self-assessment survey and intervention model that enables people to identify their unique challenges and develop practical solutions to overcome them, giving them the chance to have personal agency in combating poverty.

“Who Owns Poverty?”

The Poverty Stoplight asks the question: “Who owns poverty?” and argues the answer can be “a new approach that puts poor families in charge of defining and diagnosing their own unique, multidimensional poverty—who by owning the problem, own the solution.” This participatory methodology takes form as a self-assessment survey that serves as a metric using 50 carefully selected poverty indicators across six dimensions to help individuals evaluate their poverty status, assess their needs and discover solutions.

The approach has garnered the organization more than 700,000 Stoplights applied throughout 59 countries and hundreds of organizations, from formerly incarcerated individuals in New Orleans to poverty policy in Ecuador. From that personal agency in combating poverty, users report finding the survey engaging, feeling empowered and gaining valuable insight and context into the poverty they face.

Poverty researchers have praised the methodology for being simplistic and people-focused, stating, “The elegance of the methodology shows us that simplification is not about chasing the perfect metric to simplify into a dashboard to be used by executives in far-away boardrooms for their benevolent decision making. It is about having a simple yet contextually appropriate way of ‘measuring what we value’ and of truly bringing people into the process.”

The Stoplight’s “red, yellow, green” indicators — with red indicating extreme poverty, yellow indicating poverty and green indicating no poverty — help individuals keep track and visualize their current poverty status as well as improving progression. In Paraguay alone, the organization has helped more than 6,000 families reach the “green” indicator and more than 27,000 families generate more income, key data that serves as an important incentive for resource allocation from stakeholders.

Green Stoplight: A New Focus on a Growing Issue

In the face of the urgent need to implement environmental action, Poverty Stoplight has also introduced a new tool for users. Again taking the approach of starting closest to home when tackling a challenge, the Green Stoplight helps individuals and families self-evaluate their environmental footprint within the scope of 10 indicators:

• “Responsible water use”
• “Waste separation”
• “Recycling practices”
• “Efficient energy use”
• “Sustainable transportation”
• “Plastic use reduction”
• “Vegetable garden and composting”
• “Garbage disposal”
• Extreme weather patterns and environmental protection

Using the same self-assessment approach, as well as the guiding visuals of the “red, yellow, green” progress indicators, the tool again demonstrates an agency for individuals in creating environmental change the same way it gave personal agency in combating poverty.

Bringing Awareness

Moreover, the new focus brings their awareness to a particularly relevant issue as the effects of natural disasters and extreme weather continue to hit the world’s poorest people first and hardest. With projections predicting extreme weather around the world to push an additional 120 million people into poverty by 2030, the Green Stoplight is a tool for everyone, with a recent campaign targeting university students in Paraguay to take the assessment and apply it to their household and communities.

The campaign also helped create partnerships with universities and other institutions in a joint commitment to furthering sustainability through collective individual change. These partnerships also work to develop more practical solutions for identified problems that can be used as additional indicators to the current 10 and create a larger impact on an eventually global scale.

– Jannah Khalil

Jannah is based in Sacramento, CA, USA and focuses on Good News and Technology for The Borgen Project.

Photo: Flickr