Antipoverty policies in developing countries often assume that targeting poor
households will be reasonably effective in reaching poor individuals. We question this
assumption. Our comprehensive assessment for Sub-Saharan Africa reveals that
undernourished women and children are spread quite widely across the distribution of
household wealth and consumption. While the expected positive household wealth effects
on individual nutritional status are evident, roughly three-quarters of underweight women
and under-nourished children are not found in the poorest 20% of households, and around
half are not found in the poorest 40%. The mean joint probability of being an
underweight woman and living in the poorest wealth quintile is only 0.03. Countries with
higher overall rates of undernutrition tend to have a higher share of undernourished
individuals in non-poor households. The results are consistent with existing evidence of
substantial intra-household inequality in nutritional attainments