Following the endorsement of the Millennium Development Goals, there is an increasing
demand for methods to track poverty regularly. This paper develops an economically
intuitive and inexpensive methodology to do so in the absence of regular, comparable
data on household consumption. The minimum data requirements for the methodology
are the availability of a household budget survey and a series of surveys with a
comparable set of asset data also contained in the budget survey. The methodology is
illustrated using a series of Demographic Health Surveys from Kenya