For those seeking to measure financial health in a quick and simple way, we recommend applying only the Access-to-Funds module of the questionnaire. The questions in our recommended Access-to-Funds module are identical to the 2020 Global Findex’s resilience questions in order to promote standardization in data collection across the sector. This alignment creates the added benefit of being able to leverage other data from the Global Findex database.

Our work also attempted to identify the most important questions from the remaining two sections, Financial Behavior and Access-to-Finance, to add to a longer version of a financial health survey instrument. Our analysis showed that particularly in the Financial Behavior section, none of the questions could be identified as clear winners across the multiple settings in which they were tested. For those wishing to use a longer version of our instrument to capture data on Financial Behavior and Access-to-Finance questions in addition to the Access-to-Funds measure, we recommend picking from the long-form version of our recommended survey instrument, and either selecting those indicators that may be most relevant to your setting or collecting responses on all and then testing to see which questions are most strongly correlated with financial health for your target population. Finally, we include a set of potential context questions, including questions about income volatility and predictability, which we find to be highly correlated with financial health.

From June 2018 to February 2019, Innovations for Poverty Action administered this survey to 11,876 individuals in seven countries. For a full discussion of the development, piloting, and empirical validation of these indicators, as well as findings, please consult this project’s final report.