Engaging in

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Engaging in

• Participatory Rural Appraisal in developing
  countries

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Objectives

• Learn about useful tools for working with low
  literacy populations in rural areas (developing
  countries) - Participatory Rural Appraisal tools
• Stimulate your thinking and creativity for
  engaging community members in doing participatory
  needs assessment

The best item to pack for any trip to the
developing world or not is an open mind
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Challenges for outside experts students

• Expect the unexpected (rodents, mosquitoes,
  street hawking, open markets)
• Expect poor road conditions
• No electricity or power failures (your computer
  loses power)
• Lots of people may follow you around (no
  confidentiality!)
• Time feels different
• So how are you going to get your work done?

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Participatory Rural Appraisal(PRA)

• Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) An approach
  (and family of methodologies) for shared learning
  between local people and outsiders to enable
  development practitioners, government officials,
  and local people to plan together appropriate
  interventions
• Also known as Participatory Learning and Action
  (PLA)

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Key Principles

• Participation local people serve as partners in
  data collection and analysis
• Flexibility- not a standardized methodology
• Off-setting biases anti poverty biases are
  consciously avoided, more listening less
  lecturing
• Teamwork everyone is involved
• Diversity attempts made to identify and analyse
  contradictions and exceptions
• Optimal Ignorance leave out unessential
  details
• Systematic to get correct details and
  conclusions, it is best to cross check
• Local materials - dirt, stones, sticks (or
  paper), not computers/electronic devices

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PRA Techniques

• Interviewing Not based on questionnaires but
  issues (households, individuals, focus groups)
• Visualization
• Ranking a means by which they can rank
  preferences, problems, wealth
• Mapping - Community members depicting the
  physical or social characteristics of their
  community
• Social mapping
• Time lines
• Impact diagrams

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Social mapping with rural, low literacy
participants

• Social Mapping
• A space-related PRA
• Used to depict the habitation pattern of a
  particular region
• Drawn by local people
• Not drawn to scale but reveals what is believed
  to be relevant and important to them

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Time lines with rural, low literacy participants

• This is a time-related PRA method
• Allows people use their concept of time
• Captures the chronology of events as recalled by
  local people
• Flexible in terms of the time scale
• One day, or a lifetime, or history of the
  community

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Time line
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Impact diagrams with rural, low literacy
participants

• A flow diagram , commonly used to identify and
  depict the image of an activity, intervention or
  event
• Takes into account types of changes as perceived
  by the local people
• Helps to identify impacts of certain events -
  planned, unplanned, negative or positive

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Impact diagram
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References

• http//www.eldis.org/manuals/participation.htm
• http//info.worldbank.org/etools/docs/library/2385
  82/toolkit.pdf
• Kumar Somesh. Methods For Community
  Participation A Complete Guide for
  Practitioners.
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vC6MVTCYDQRI
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vTEZpsYLqL6Mfeature
  related

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• Participatory mapping
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vJqnm1vkbgx0feature
  related (36 sec.)
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?v4PW9TLDxWzMfeature
  related (31 sec.)