Welbourn, Alice

A brief review of participatory approaches to sexual and reproductive health is offered with a view to capturing shifts in methods and approaches with the conceptual shifts that have occurred from considering women as only reproducers to taking a rights based notion of their reproductive and sexual health. By providing the editorial overview for articles on sexual and reproductive health in this volume, the authors tease out the main issues that need to be considered by participatory development practitioners working in the area of sexual and reproductive health.

The manual provides details of a training workshop which could be run in a community. It describes the carefully studied sequence of ideas which community members can be encouraged to consider and discuss. Issues of perceptions, prejudice, love, sexuality, condoms, and HIV/AIDS are treated in a series of different sessions encouraging people's self-assertion and empowerement. Appropriate exercises and session timetables are also provided for the trainer.

This paper investigates the potential for using various PRA methods in an AIDS-related context. It looks at diagramming and ranking techniques which have been used in community development projects in different countries in Africa and Asia and suggests ways they could be used in AIDS work. The paper focuses on five questions. WHO are the different people who make up the group called the community? WHAT needs do the different sections of the community have? WHEN are different people most in need of assistance?

RRA can be used as a tool for training development workers to address the issues of "gender and health at grassroots level". Four steps show how various RRA exercises were used for training purposes : 1. Analysis of Difference - trainees are asked to explain the differences in seasonal calendars drawn by separate groups of men and women in Sierra Leone. Their first response was to say the men's maps were simply "better". 2.

This paper describes a game and a story that were presented during the workshop to show how PRA can "help people to address and resolve conflict". The TASO game (described in the appendix) was used to illustrate current HIV transmission rates in Uganda. The story showed how PRA exercises conducted by Redd Barna in Zimbabwe brought out women's and men's different views of a proposed irrigation scheme. The potential for PRA to help resolve such conflicts is the emphasis placed on "the value of good communication skills".

Reflections around the tensions between male fieldworkers and Women's Project Officers on an Oxfam project, lead to the idea that RRA training can help to raise gender awareness. The RRA approach encourages fieldworkers to listen, to see that communities are not "homogenous blobs" and to abandon preconceived ideas. A case-study from Sierra Leone shows how a social map drawing activity done separately by men and women revealed their different perceptions and needs.

It focuses on social processes, experiential, practical and political elements which are often overlooked in the literature on agricultural research and extension. Methodological issues raised by a shift in theoretical perspectives from a structured to diverse approach are explored. A broader view of the 'farmer' is called for: an approach that locates farmers, researchers and extensionists as social actors within the process of agricultural production and extension.