Reducing poverty starts with good measurement.

October 27, 2016

COSA, the ISEAL Alliance and the Sustainable Food Lab have come together to share best practices on measuring household income in order to improve the understanding of farmer livelihoods. Partners are collaborating to create consistent guidelines for data collection and reporting across a range of household income metrics that can be applied globally. The work builds on ISEAL’s Guidance on Common Core Indicators, the SFL Shared Approaches Framework, and COSA indicators.

The collaboration around household income metrics, co-led by Jessica Mullan is a vital step informing the global imperative to measure living income – the income an average family in a particular place requires to afford a decent standard of living. Increasingly, it is being used together with poverty metrics because it is better targeted to local contexts and facilitates closing the gap between what a family earns and what it would need to live sustainably.

COSA’s application of living income indicators among coffee farmers in Kenya has been used as a case study by the ISEAL Alliance and the Global Living Wage Coalition. The Living Income Working Group (supported by GIZ) is working toward aligning definitions of living income across measurement systems.

For more information or to get involved, contact Jessica Mullan