Let's Stop Trying to Quantify Household Vulnerability: The Problem With Simple Scales for Targeting and Evaluating Economic Strengthening Programs.

Introduction: Economic strengthening practitioners are increasingly seeking data collection tools that will help them target households vulnerable to HIV and poor child well-being outcomes, match households to appropriate interventions, monitor their status, and determine readiness for graduation from project support. This article discusses efforts in 3 countries to develop simple, valid tools to quantify and classify economic vulnerability status.

Methods And Findings: In Côte d'Ivoire, we conducted a cross-sectional survey with 3,749 households to develop a scale based on the definition of HIV-related economic vulnerability from the U.

Assessing Household Economic Vulnerability in HIV-Affected Communities in Five Regions of Côte d'Ivoire.

The objective of this study was to identify and describe levels of household economic vulnerability in HIV-affected communities in Côte d'Ivoire, defined as those with a high prevalence of HIV and large numbers of orphans and vulnerable children. We conducted a cross-sectional survey of 3,749 households in five health regions of Côte d'Ivoire. Using principal component analysis, we attempted to identify sets of correlated vulnerabilities and derive a small number of composite scores to create an index for targeting interventions to vulnerable populations.