The majority of African countries, included Senegal, continue to face widespread poverty. The
objective of poverty reduction is accompanied by a set of initiatives and programs that might be
reflected in the government budget allocation. A crucial point is to explore, in a context of
severely limited resources, how to optimize budget allocation between different sectors and
therefore get higher impact without necessarily much financial resources. In an effort to inform
this discussion, this paper examines the linkage between disaggregated government expenditures
and poverty using the most recent poverty monitoring survey in Senegal. Unlike most previous
studies, our analysis is based on fuzzy set theory in the aim to find a suitable, complete and
reliable way of measuring poverty, to overcome the limitations of the one-dimensional
framework, and better assess the impact of prior government expenditures. High heterogeneity in
poverty appears from the decomposition of the overall poverty by location and by household
head’s characteristics. The results from the model, elucidate that previous government spending
in infrastructure and spending on social development and women entrepreneurship yielded some
positive impacts on poverty.