How can a central government monitor the performance of a decentralized pov
erty program when the incidence of the program's benefits is unobserved at
the local level? This article shows that, using a poverty map and the corre
sponding spending allocation across geographic areas, one can identify the
latent differences in mean program allocations to the poor and the nonpoor.
The national measure of targeting performance can also be decomposed into
subgroups. An application to an antipoverty program in Argentina is used to
assess the program's performance before and after reforms. Increases in fu
nding and changes in program design brought large gains to the poor, althou
gh Performance differed across Provinces.