Computer Vision Based PPI Tool Version 2.0

The Poverty Probability Index (PPI®) is a poverty measurement tool for organizations and businesses with a mission to serve the poor. The PPI is statistically-sound, yet simple to use: the answers to 10 questions about a household’s characteristics and asset ownership are scored to compute the likelihood that the household is living below the poverty line.

Recording the answers to these 10 questions on initial onboarding of a client and at future period intervals is fraught with manual human error and data integrity issues. Leveraging Cloud Vision, a field officer would simply have to take a series of photos with their smartphone camera inside and outside of the house and then the Cloud Vision would be able to deduce based on the images the response to the 10 questions (i.e. the presence of soot on the walls would denote a coal-base stove is using, the image could easily depict what material the roof is made of, the image could detect the BMI of the family, the image could detect if there is a TV in the household.