The Well-Being Index is a measure of household well-being derived from a UN definition of poverty as a lack of basic necessities. The power of the BNS is that communities’ themselves define what goods and services are and are not basic necessities. After running a set of focus groups across the study area where we asked “What is something that everyone should have and no one should have to live without?” we were able to generate a list of  items that includes both goods (e.g. machete; table and chairs) and services (e.g. access to drinking water within 15 minute’s walk; women providing health care for women). During the actual survey, each household is asked whether it has access to each item on the list, and whether the subject believes that the item is indeed a basic necessity.  The WBI is built from the sum of the goods and services that a household has access to, each weighted by the proportion of respondents who thought that item was a basic necessity, normalized by the highest possible score. 
The wealth score is built from the sum of goods alone, weighted by the price and quantity of each good.

The Adule Male Equivalent (AME) was developed by the FAO to provide an expression of household food intake that accounts for the composition of the household and allows the direct comparision of food or energy intakes of households of different sizes and compositions. It is defined as the energy requirement of a household or another food consumption unit expressed as a multiple of an adult male’s energy requirement.
The household size is the number of people in the household.