Participatory Rural Appraisal and Planning (PRAP): the experience of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme

The Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) has worked with a number of village communities in a variety of social and agroecological contexts - tribal areas, semi-arid areas and relatively well-endowed areas of the state of Gujarat. This paper describes the AKRSP approach to PRA and planning. It looks at its methodology, the objective of the planning exercise, who should participate, informing villagers about the programme, and the detail of the programme. In terms of the latter, base map preparation, transect walks, equity aspects, focus groups, village meetings, management plans and community proposals are discussed. In conclusion, the paper points to a number of problems with PRA. Problems identified include: an excessive amount of data being collected; a lack of an effective method for filtering data; as well as a possible bias toward physical resource analysis. Points for trainers are also given.