The cost of drawing and carrying water is just one of the hidden costs of being poor. Photo: Matthieu A. (flickr)

It's relatively easy to measure poverty in terms of known factors like income. Less often quantified are the additional challenges poor people face, like the extra time they may spend just to fulfill their basic needs, like water and health care.

Several students at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs have set out to create indices that measure the extra costs those living in poverty face daily. These costs, they say, are effectively "a tax on being poor," and by measuring them, they hope to make them easier to address.

For example, sometimes having a low income doesn't just mean you don't have much money for food — it also means that you can't afford to live in a neighborhood with running water, so you have to spend time hauling water home from a well, and you get sick more often because the water isn't treated, they explain in a recent post for the Majority Markets blog. The challenge for these students is to quantify what poor people lose because of such issues.

The goal of such measurements isn't just to top off the mountains of statistical information available today, of course. Rather, they clarify on Majority Markets, it's to help companies understand where markets have failed, so that they can make them work:

Our work, we hope, would serve as a guide for private sector companies to understand the opportunity to create socially responsible and profitable business models that would contribute to reduce the burden of being poor among low-income markets.

The students' work could help give both researchers and businesspeople a clearer picture of the challenges that the poor face in their daily lives, and be a tool that helps them design programs and products that respond specifically to these needs.