The methodology for poverty monitoring sketched out in this paper is an attempt to overcome some of the limitations of conventional approaches, in particular their insensitivity to gender differentials in the causes and effects of poverty, these limitation are briefly discussed in the first section of the paper. An alternative conceptual framework within which rural poverty can be analysed and measured in the context of rural Bangladesh is presented next. In the third section, empirical examples from Bangladesh are used to expand on some of the conceptual issues. They are drawn from the available literature on rural poverty in Bangladesh as well as on observations…