Adversity, including malnutrition, has had irrefutable effects on child development and mental health. India, for example, has approximately 160 million children in poverty: The growth of up to 59% of rural and 48% of all children is stunted. Hundreds of thousands of nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) work with these disadvantaged children to increase their life skills and ameliorate effects of adversity. Yet a simple effective measure of program impact has remained elusive. We used observational data from 1,136 disadvantaged children aged 8 to 16 years to construct
a simple 5-item impact assessment scale. Although the scale was developed in India, we envisage that it could be used with disadvantaged children worldwide.