Taking on debt is one coping strategy households can adopt when they are not able to meet their essential needs, and can provide an indication for the sustainability of current consumption. Debt is defined as the sum of money currently owed by the household to formal or informal lenders, including relatives.
Household debt can be analysed in various ways, dependent on the context and analytical objectives. Therefore, we do not propose a single indicator, but a set of indicators that can be adjusted based on the context. These include the reason for contracting debt, the source, the estimated repayment time and a differentiation between older and newly incurred debts.
Please find below the resources that will help you in analysing and interpreting the debt indicator.
The survey module required for the set of debt indicators can be found here.
The XLS form with the set of indicators on debt extracted from the Survey Designer to help simplify the authoring of forms in Excel. The XLS Form is then converted to an ODK XForm, a popular open form standard, that allows you to author a form with complex functionality like skip logic in a consistent way across a number of web and mobile data collection platforms. This form is identical to survey module.
Scripts for SPSS (Syntax) and STATA (do file) to analyse debt indicators as indicated in the ENA guidelines is available here and on Github.
The ENA Guidance which describes how debt indicators are used and analysed in essential needs analysis. A detailed description of the indicator can be found on p. 22.
For more information, please contact the Needs Assessments and Targeting Unit in HQ RAM global.assessmentandtargeting@wfp.org.