Resources

A report of a one day workshop held in Maputo for practitioners, partners and beneficiaries of the Mozambique Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA). The report examines three themes: process, utility and institutionalisation.
The PPA process and methodological issues of qualitative data collection, institutional partnerships and PPA implementation are discussed under process. Utility of the PPA is looked at in terms of the value added of participatory and qualitative approaches and the issue of institutionalisation includes options for increasing the application and impact of the PPA as a functional tool for poverty alleviation activities.

The book explores the main issues and concerns of development professionals about adapting PRA from micro to macro organisations. It includes a checklist of practical considerations on training, taking projects from pilots and scaling up, changing institutional cultures and procedures and introducing participatory monitoring and evaluation.

This video explores numerous issues surrounding participatory poverty assessments (PPAs), using the example of a PPA in Tanzania. A key issue is the identification of the poor, about which appropriate information is needed to inform government policy. In contrast to traditional surveys of income-poverty, the PPA provides a way to understand poverty from the perspective of the poor and to enable this perspective to influence policy. The importance of the involvement of policy makers in the PPA is stressed at several points in the video. This involvement contributed to chantes in attitudes to the poor within government and a recognition of the need for a corresponding change in government development tactics. The findings of the PPA were presented at policy workshops and contributed to changes in thinking about the nature and characteristics of poverty in Tanzania, as well as more specific policy reforms. The PPA primarily used PRA methods and visual materials developed by local artists in the PPA. The methods shown include, mapping, discussion of well-being, wealth ranking with villagers and district officials, 'story with a gap' and seasonality analysis. Among the highlighted findings of the PPA are that: indicators of poverty are location specific; intangible indicators of deprivation are important; strong gender differences exist in the prioritisation of problems; the poor adapt to seasonality through complex coping strategies. The PPA also revealed that participatory methods could be used to construct time series price data for rural Tanzania, which had not previously existed. The links between the PPA's findings regarding the causes of poverty and the implications for policy are highlighted, including access to land, agricultural policy, lack of production inputs, environmental degradation and access to credit and savings.

This document provides guidelines to be used as a reference for the implementation process of a proposed Nutrition and Early Childhood Development Project in Uganda.
PRA is suggested as a key strategy to be used in the community planning and relevant techniques and training methods which can be used at each stage in the process are described. The guidelines also considrer the process of community mobilisation.