Resources · Recursos
A working glossary and a guide to the sources behind the research, for anyone who wants to understand, teach or cite the concept of hidden poverty.
Glossary
Hidden poverty (pobreza oculta). Conditions of deprivation among households formally classified as non-poor, produced and sustained through discursive, institutional and relational invisibility. Read more.
Vulnerability (vulnerabilidad). Prospective exposure to the risk of falling into poverty. Unlike hidden poverty, the deprivation has not yet happened.
Institutional invisibility, or non-recognition. The distance between being processed by a classification system and being recognised by it as a subject eligible for intervention. In this research it is treated as a structural effect of design decisions, not as a technical error.
Institutional invisibility gradient. An ordinal variable that counts how many non-recognition filters accumulate on a household: a statistical gap, an administrative gap and a territorial gap. It is not a measure of poverty; it locates the visibility gap inside the classification system itself. See the project.
Sisbén IV. Colombia’s national instrument for classifying households by socioeconomic condition, and the entry point to most social programmes. Since 2021 it sorts households into groups A, B, C and D from a composite score. It is overseen by the Departamento Nacional de Planeación (DNP).
C09/C10 threshold. The boundary within Sisbén IV group C where eligibility for most social programmes ends. Households from C10 upwards, and group D, remain registered but are classified as having sufficient economic capacity.
Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI, IPM). The official poverty measure produced by DANE. It combines 15 deprivations in five dimensions, and a household counts as poor when it reaches at least five of the fifteen (one third). A household whose deprivations sit in a single dimension, such as work, can stay below that line.
Stratum (estrato). Colombia’s socioeconomic stratification, from 1 to 6, created to set public-utility tariffs. It classifies properties and their surroundings, not the households that live in them.
Block (manzana) and UPZ. The block is the smallest spatial unit DANE uses for statistical data. The UPZ (Unidad de Planeamiento Zonal) is a planning unit of Bogotá made up of several neighbourhoods. The analysis works at three scales: block, UPZ and locality.
Photo elicitation. A method in which participants take photographs, here with disposable cameras, and then discuss them with the researcher in a return interview. Read why we use it.
Data and instruments
The sources behind the Bogotá project. The household-level microdata are not published on this site.
Sisbén IV registry, Bogotá 2024
1,746,248 registered households with spatial coordinates, shared with the project by Sisbén through the DNP. sisben.gov.co · dnp.gov.co
National Geostatistical Framework
City blocks (44,052 in the analysis) from the 2018 National Population and Housing Census, produced by DANE. dane.gov.co
IDECA, Bogotá’s spatial data infrastructure
UPZs and localities, plus the urban layers used to characterise the territories. ideca.gov.co
A reading list on hidden poverty and institutional recognition will be added here as the papers take shape. To suggest a resource, get in touch.
