[3]: xiii, xv Before the 1990s, household-survey approaches were the main way to measure poverty.
[4]: 3 By 1998, 43 PPAs had been conducted: 28 in Africa, 6 in Latin America, 5 in Eastern Europe, and 4 in Asia.
[3]: xiii, xiv, 15 Early PPAs focused most on making higher quality information available to policy makers, rather than seeing the poor as itself being involved in the process of reducing poverty.
[3]: 5 Participatory poverty assessments confirmed the multidimensional nature of poverty (i.e. that the poor deal not just with lack of money, but with various problems like lack of resources, poor health, physical violence, social isolation, etc.)
[3]: vi PPAs have also been able to access information that was not obtained in household surveys by building trust.
For instance PPAs have obtained information on sensitive topics such as child prostitution, drug use, and domestic violence in relation to poverty.