This issue of ActionAid's newsletter covers themes such as making civil society voices heard, educational inequalities in the UK and the legacy of Paulo Freire. A series of articles looks at various aspects of REFLECT from training, scaling-up and REFLECT beyond literacy.
This document is a proposal by ActionAid and ProNet to add a child focus to the REFLECT process, a participatory approach to literacy and numeracy acquisition which has been geared to adults. The proposed location of the REFLECT youth club pilot program is the Dangme West District in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. The goal is to help school and non-school going children to develop basic literacy and numeracy skills in their mother tongue and empower them to create social change.
Action Aid's Impact Assessment Unit (IAU) convened an international five-day workshop in Nov/Dec 1998, where 28 staff from 18 countries met to discuss ways to assess change. Whilst seeking principles that would guide their work in an inclusive and participatory way, the team were mindful of both the "time" such approaches demand of people, and the degree to which participation can be used as a tool for consultation rather than empowerment.
This edition looks at interconnections between education and power. Articles cover: accountability of schools to communities, primary education for working children in India, theatre for development, participatory planning using Planning For Real, REFLECT, disability, gender, and more.
This document includes, details of the process used to review ActionAids programme in Somaliland and provides both a summary and details of the findings. The review was carried out by a group of both men and women composed of community based organisation members, village elders, staff from government institutions and other professionals. Mapping, interviews and small group discussions were used to elicit data on availability, relevance, accessibility, utilisation, coverage, quality, effort, efficiency and impact indicators.
This report is a typescript of presentations made by PRA training workshop participants. The pattern of training was that a method was discussed at base, participants sent to villages to attempt to use the method, after which they met at the base and presented the process of the exercise as well as the content of the results. The presentations included village social and resource maps, transects, seasonal analysis, wealth ranking and social organisation analysis.
ActionAid was selected as a collaborating NGO on a World Bank-supported, Government of Karnataka programme to mobilise community participation in water and sanitation supply. The short article describes "how the village people...will own the project from start to finish". A 'sense of ownership' in the new scheme was instilled by making village communities contribute to the costs, to ensure that they will be prepared to take responsibility for operation and maintenance.
The new adult literacy methodology REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques) uses PRA methods to teach literacy instead of a traditional primer. This workshop discussed the experiences of the three pilot projects in Bangladesh, El Salvador and Uganda. Six sources to this new approach are identified as : Freire, PRA, visual literacy, women's literacy, numeracy and the failure of other methods. Role play was used to show workshop participants the process of map and matrix construction and how literacy/numeracy work emerged.