Reading Sisbén IV: what the score doesn't tell you

Sisbén IV is Colombia’s primary instrument for targeting social programs. Understanding how it works — and where it fails — is essential for understanding hidden poverty.

How Sisbén IV works

Sisbén IV assigns every registered household a composite score based on observable indicators: housing conditions, access to services, educational levels, asset ownership, and employment characteristics. The score runs from 0 to 100. Households below certain thresholds (varying by program) are eligible for social transfers.

The C09 threshold — the upper boundary of the “C” group — is particularly significant. Households above C09 are officially classified as non-poor and excluded from most social protection programs.

The ILSIS layer

ILSIS (Índice de Localización de los Sistemas de Información Social) is a territorial aggregation index produced by the Secretaría Distrital de Integración Social (SDIS) in Bogotá. It aggregates household-level Sisbén data to the block and UPZ scale, creating a territorial index of social conditions.

The combination of Sisbén IV individual scores and ILSIS territorial aggregation is meant to provide a comprehensive picture of need. But this combination produces a structural blind spot.

The blind spot

Households that are above the C09 threshold but experiencing multidimensional deprivation are invisible in both systems:

• They are above Sisbén’s targeting threshold → excluded from individual targeting
• Their UPZ shows low aggregate need (because the visible poor are a small share) → excluded from territorial targeting

The result: 193,406 households in Bogotá that our analysis identifies as experiencing hidden poverty are invisible at the UPZ scale in the combined Sisbén IV + ILSIS system.

This is not a measurement error. It is a structural effect produced by specific design decisions — the choice of threshold, the choice of aggregation unit, the choice of indicators. Design decisions that made perfect sense for addressing visible poverty, and that systematically fail for hidden poverty.

What the data shows geographically

The institutional invisibility is not evenly distributed. It concentrates in specific UPZs — particularly Teusaquillo, Galerías, Los Cedros, and Quinta Paredes — where stratum 3–4 households with above-threshold Sisbén scores experience significant hidden deprivation.

These are not the poorest neighborhoods in Bogotá. They are, in many cases, neighborhoods associated with the middle class. That is precisely the point.