Research / Investigación

The Research / La Investigación

More than measuring poverty, this project seeks to understand how its invisibility is produced — and what that reveals about the limits of the instruments through which the city decides whom to help.

General Objective

To analyse the institutional mechanisms that produce the non-recognition of hidden poverty in Bogotá, articulating the spatial diagnosis of the classification system with the perceptions of those who live it and those who operate it.

Conceptual Framework

Hidden poverty refers to conditions of deprivation among households formally classified as non-poor, produced and sustained through discursive, institutional, and relational invisibility. Unlike conventional poverty — measured through income thresholds and consumption patterns — hidden poverty remains obscured by social norms, relational dynamics, and institutional blind spots.

This project understands hidden poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon with five key dimensions and four modifying factors. Crucially, the invisibility of these households is not a failure of the system — it is, in large part, what the system produces.

Five Dimensions / Cinco dimensiones

💰 Economic

Precarious employment, downward social mobility, underemployment, financial precariousness, material deprivation. Limits financial stability and renders economic difficulties invisible.

🤝 Social

Social connectivity and support networks, isolation and withdrawal, stigma and social perceptions. Weakens social bonds, increases shame and exclusion.

✊ Empowerment & Agency

Economic autonomy and decision-making, representational agency, intersectional barriers. Limits control over one’s own life and excludes people from policy formulation.

🧠 Psychosocial & Wellbeing

Sense of purpose, shame as an emotional factor, suffering of body, mind, and spirit. Leads to psychological distress, identity crises, and diminished self-worth.

🏛️ Political-Symbolic

Invisibility in public policy, political invisibility, structural exclusion. Hidden poverty is not recognised in policy and remains excluded from social protection systems.

Four Modifying Factors

Location — Urban areas tend to conceal financial difficulties due to higher costs of living and social pressures. · Temporality — Life-course events (job loss, illness, recession) can trigger or aggravate hidden poverty. · Cultural beliefs — Social attitudes towards success and self-sufficiency influence whether people seek help or suffer in silence. · Social strata — Downwardly mobile middle-class households, young professionals with heavy debt, and migrant communities face distinct experiences.

Component 1 — The System From the Outside

Spatial Institutional Diagnosis

This component starts from a central premise: the institutional invisibility of hidden poverty is not a technical error of measurement instruments but a structural effect produced by specific design decisions. To demonstrate this empirically, an institutional invisibility gradient will be constructed — an ordinal variable capturing the progressive accumulation of non-recognition mechanisms to which each household in Bogotá’s Sisbén IV is exposed.

The data

1,746,248 registered households in Bogotá
44,052 city blocks
112 UPZs
3 scales: block, UPZ, locality
99.4% spatial assignment rate

The three gradient filters

Filter 1 — Statistical gap: households not classified as poor by MPI but with informal/prolonged unemployment.

Filter 2 — Asset-debt trap: households with housing assets financed by mortgage debt exceeding their repayment capacity.

Filter 3 — Education expenditure pressure: households with children in private education whose cost represents a disproportionate share of income.

Focus territories

Teusaquillo
Los Cedros
Galerías
Quinta Paredes

Identified through the institutional invisibility gradient as zones of highest non-recognition concentration.

Component 2 — The System From the Inside

Lived Experience & Institutional Perceptions

This component explores the invisibility from two complementary perspectives: how households in areas of high institutional invisibility perceive and navigate their relationship with the social protection system, and how institutional actors read and classify the population the system does not recognise.

The research uses a performative angle — rather than asking directly about economic situation, it explores tensions between appearance and lived experience. This is key: households experiencing hidden poverty often do not name it as poverty, because poverty is what happens to other people.

With households

Fieldwork sequence: initial interview → disposable camera → urban walk → collaborative mapping workshop → return interview analyzing photos together.

Recruitment without poverty language: stratum 3–4, at least one informal or underemployed worker, active private education spending and/or mortgage.

With institutional actors

Semi-structured interviews with SDIS officials, Sisbén IV operators, and social service frontline workers. Exploring how they read and classify the population the system does not recognise — and whether that reading reproduces or challenges the invisibility mechanisms documented in Component 1.

Integrative question: Is the institutional non-recognition of hidden poverty co-produced from above and below — that is, do both the logic of the system and the perceptions of households and officials contribute to sustaining invisibility?