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The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), established in 1975, provides evidence-based policy solutions to sustainably end hunger and malnutrition and reduce poverty. The Institute conducts research, communicates results, optimizes partnerships, and builds capacity to ensure sustainable food production, promote healthy food systems, improve markets and trade, transform agriculture, build resilience, and strengthen institutions and governance. Gender is considered in all of the Institute's work. IFPRI collaborates with partners around the world, including development implementers, public institutions, the private sector, and farmers' organizations, to ensure that local, national, regional, and global food policies are based on evidence. IFPRI is a member of the CGIAR Consortium.

By means of the latest seven national household surveys of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this article uncovers the very volatile sampling frame used underneath all survey designs. As a result, the reliability of much associated survey information as well as any corresponding temporal analysis are seriously jeopardized. Relying on recent vaccination, school enrolment and election data, the article proposes a post-stratification technique to retroactively control for these erratic variations in sampling frame in an attempt to identify real socio-economic trends. Although the proposed technique did not restore full comparability of survey data in all respects, it has been able to eliminate an essential part of the spuriousness as illustrated by assessing trends in asset ownership under both the biased and stabilized sampling frames.

We argue that the capability approach can be very helpful in exploring the links between poverty and place, thereby providing a more accurate understanding of poverty processes. We demonstrate how Sen’s list of ‘conversion factors’ allows one to incorporate but also to go beyond the usual description of the connection between place and well‐being in terms of physical and social infrastructure. More in particular, we give emphasis on the role of place in the conversion of doings into earnings. We then apply the theoretical argument to a representative sample of households in Kinshasa. Although monetary indicators of well‐being and poverty indicate a downward levelling of different regions of the capital city that have been historically quite different, an exploration of the different sources of parametric variation suggests that place does continue to have a significant impact on well‐being.Capability approach, 1‐2‐3 Survey, Kinshasa, Urban poverty,