Sisbén IV — Colombia's Algorithmic Poverty-Targeting Score, and What an Independent Study Found Wrong With It

Sisbén (Sistema de Identificación de Potenciales Beneficiarios de Programas Sociales) is Colombia's national targeting instrument, run by the Departamento Nacional de Planeación (DNP), used to decide who qualifies for dozens of social programmes: health subsidies, the Colombia Mayor old-age pension, housing subsidies, ICBF childcare and education grants among them. Since 2020, Metodología IV has combined housing, health, education and labour-market variables into a household score, replacing the earlier pure per-capita-income proxy and sorting households into four groups (A-D) with subgroups that individual programmes use to set their own eligibility cut-offs.

A peer-reviewed 2024 study in Desarrollo y Sociedad (Universidad de los Andes) directly compared Sisbén IV's classification of households against Colombia's official Multidimensional Poverty Index (IPM) and found only slight statistical agreement (Cohen's kappa below 0.36): 37.69% of households the IPM does not consider poor were nonetheless classified as poor by Sisbén, while 4.89% of IPM-poor households were missed entirely. Independent analysis (Guberney/Al Poniente, 2026) situates these figures against known problems in the prior methodology, Sisbén III, which earlier studies found had inclusion errors of 49.9% against monetary poverty and 64.8% against multidimensional poverty.

DNP's public operating manual documents the full points-based methodology, and the government presents Metodología IV as an improvement on its predecessor. But the same literature that documents the improvement also finds the current score still substantially misaligned with the government's own poverty measure, with real consequences: misclassified households can be wrongly denied or wrongly granted access to means-tested benefits. Advocacy and academic analysis have raised concerns about the opacity of the score to the citizens it classifies, and about the dignity implications of an algorithmic gate to essential services.

Read the full analysis: https://www.sdp.gov.co/gestion-estudios-estrategicos/sisben/metodologia-4