Srivastava, K.

This reflection on a training workshop covers a number of issues, including the ritualisation and homogenisation of PRA, and the quantitative and categorising orientation while ignoring other forms of expression. Much of the note concerns the need to highlight empowerment elements of PRA: how do you bring villagers together? How do you bring women together? What processes can enable the poor to articulate? How can empowerment through PRA be sustained and nurtured? It touches on the issue of PRA as 'empowerment' or 'research tool'?

This thought-provoking article reflects on issues around PRA, after the author attended a two day workshop in the UK. Srivastava questions the "mystification" of PRA techniques through using technical labels, such as "transect", and goes on to discuss the political dimensions of "empowerment through PRA". Using examples from her experience of working with poor women in India, she stresses the need for PRA "not to become a one-way process ...of eliciting knowledge from the people."