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Abstract
Rapid Rural Appraisal techniques are frequently used for wealth-ranking of households in rural
communities. The main justifications of such approaches are that they are fast, allow prestratification
of households in preparation for surveys and that they have been shown to have at
least some empirical validity as means of stratifying households by socio-economic status.
Sometimes, however, the participatory process may fail to produce consistent wealth categories,
or people refuse to accept labels such as ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ and/or are reluctant to assign such
categories to households within their village. A household survey in Tanzania was conducted in
12 villages across eastern Tanzania in 2008-2010. In all villages a participatory wealth ranking
exercise was conducted and used for stratification of households. Sample households (n=40 per
village) were allocated proportionally to wealth categories. The structured household survey
emphasized assets, income, and perceived effects of Participatory Forest Management. The
value of individual non-productive assets was estimated through a follow-up survey and
combined with results from the household survey to estimate total value of assets for each
household. In this study the original, partly inconsistent wealth ranking is examined and
compared with estimated incomes and asset values. Next, alternative wealth classification rules
are introduced and resulting classification outcomes are examined and discussed.