One of the most common ways of measuring poverty is to set a monthly average on which a family can survive - this is called the poverty line. If a family has an average income below this amount, the household and its members are said to be living in poverty. The poverty line is an amount that changes according to the size of the household, its age and composition.
Another way of measuring poverty is by measuring the poverty gap. The poverty gap shows how far a household falls below the poverty line, so in other words it shows the depth of, or degree of poverty. In some provinces many people may be below the poverty line but they may be just a little bit below it. In other provinces fewer people could be below the poverty line but they could be far below it. These two types of poverty distribution in your population obviously need a different response.
The weakness of these measures is that they only measure income and not any other state support or assets that families can use. For example in South Africa the poverty line in 2003 was about R1100 per average family per month in income. While a huge part of the population have less "income" than R1100 per month, the government also provided free or subsidised electricity, water, schooling, health care and housing to many poor people. These are things that they would otherwise have had to pay for out of their limited income. All the free or subsidised services also equals about R1100 per household per month.