What do we think we’re doing when we do ‘development’?  Surely, it has to be about making lives better for people as they themselves experience them. But we know surprisingly little about how poor people actually define ‘making lives better’.  And when it comes to aid allocation, poor people are rarely asked about their priorities. Several current initiatives are seeking to tackle this gap, with Oxfam Scotland’s work on the HumanKind Index providing one recent example.

To be effective, any new metric needs to be easy to use for decision makers, so that it becomes an effective tool for allocating resources and planning interventions, and in their monitoring and evaluation. The challenge, and therefore the research question, is to establish whether we can devise a way of measuring outcomes, based on poor people’s own values, which strikes the right balance between a reasonable representation of reality and usability by policy makers.

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