Resources

The international NGO, Concern Worldwide, decided to assess whether its Integrated Rural Development Projects (IRDP) are reaching the extreme poor. Dimla was chosen as a site for a participatory research study which asked two questions 1) Who are the extreme poor? and 2) Is Concern's Dimla project reaching the extreme poor effectively through its existing activities? This article presents the process and findings of this research. The research focuses on a category of extreme poor termed the 'helpless poor' and why they have not often been able to participate fully in the project. It concludes with key learnings and suggests a specifically targeted pro-extreme poor strategy is required.

The World Bank-funded Uttar Pradesh Diversified Agriculture Support project (UPDASP) in India is supporting a Farming System Approach (FSA) in 32 districts of the state of Uttar Pradesh, with the major emphasis on natural resources management, employment generation, value addition and marketing. Training is an important part of the project for both farmers and field staff. This article shares experience gained during a participatory evaluation of the training provided under the project, and focuses particularly on describing the participatory tools specifically developed for the evaluation of this training rather than the outcomes. These tools include Card Sorting, Johari's window, the Learning Matrix, the Fishbone, Tree Mapping and Ranking. It concludes with lessons learnt and emphasises that the tools and techniques used in the evaluation made it clear to participants how effective participatory methodologies are, especially in the context of monitoring and evaluation.

Rapid changes are taking place in international development. The past two decades have promoted the ideals of participation and partnership, yet key decisions affecting people's lives continue to be made without sufficient attention to the socio-political realities of the countries in which they live. Embedded working traditions, vested interests and institutional inertia mean that old habits and cultures persist among the development community. On this premise, the authors of this book describe the need to recognise the complex, non-linear nature of development assistance and how bureaucratic procedures and power relations hinder poverty reduction in the new aid environment. The book begins with a conceptual and historical analysis of aid, exposing the challenges and opportunities facing aid professionals today. It argues for greater attention to accountability and the adoption of rights based approaches. In section two, practitioners, policymakers and researchers discuss the realities of power and relationships from their experiences across 16 countries. Their accounts, from government, donors and civil society, expose the highly politicised and dynamic aid environment in which they work. The book then explores ways forward for aid agencies, challenging existing political, institutional and personal ways of working. Breaking the barriers to ensure more inclusive aid will require visionary leadership and a courageous commitment to change. The authors show how translating rhetoric into practice relies on changing the attitudes and behaviours of individual actors. The book aims to present a contribution to the understanding of how development assistance and poverty reduction can be most effectively delivered by the professionals and agencies involved.

This paper is part of the series Lessons for change about organisational learning, resulting from a collaboration between ActionAid, DFID, Sida and the Participation Group at the Institute of Development Studies to explore understandings of learning and to document innovative approaches. Based on the author's own experience of working for development agencies, most recently as head of a country office in Latin America, this paper also draws on research carried out in 2003 and supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) Asia Regional Policy Research Fund. This included interviewing DFID's partners in one country and running workshops for DFID staff in the same and in two other country offices. The first draft also benefited very considerably from the opportunity of sharing ideas and experience at a workshop in Sahy, Sao Paolo on Partnerships and Influencing, described in another paper in this series. The paper summarises the principal theme and poses some questions for readers to consider and discuss, possibly in workshops that they may wish to organise. It briefly reviews and critiques current understandings of influencing in the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and provides examples from Latin America of efforts to take the agenda further. It looks at how these understandings have been applied and developed in parts of Asia. Finally it proposes some fundamental principles for influencing and explores the operational implications of these for teams in country offices of DFID and other international development agencies.

This overview introduces the concept of community-based planning (CBP) looking back at its development and how it has evolved in the light of an increased emphasis on decentralisation in many countries during the 1980s and 90s. In this context it also considers the relevance of community-driven development models, including participatory poverty analysis, being promoted by parts of the World Bank over the last five to ten years, which typically have included a CBP component. It looks at the end uses of CBP in integrated development planning and sectoral planning; in promoting community action and control over development; and to comply with policy or legislation for public participation in planning. It examines approaches and methodologies, with the use of PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) methods; the role of facilitators and training; community managed funds; accountability, monitoring and evaluation; and linkages to local government and higher-level planning. It evaluates the impacts of CBP on different policy levels, the quality of services and community participation and action. The future development of CBP is discussed with a need for an increased effectiveness and widening of the approach. It concludes by linking the topics discussed with the following articles of pla notes 49.

The concept and practice of participatory planning is not new in Ghana, however the link to the national planning system is either weak or non-existent. This article highlights the experiences of two projects which aim to deepen community participation in planning and link it to the existing planning system of the country. It also discusses GhanaÆs experience in planning at the sub-district level, reviewing approaches by the communities, NGOs, project interventions, etc.; and outlines GhanaÆs local government system, CBP (community based planning), and the way forward. It describes the application of CBP in Ghana with experiences from a project which was part of DFID funded action research project covering Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ghana, and South Africa, where GhanaÆs experiences of participatory planning processes were reviewed and a steering committee established. The councils, New Edubiase and Morso/Kuofa, were chosen to host a CBM pilot project which proved successful. The second project was the Village Infrastructure Project (VIP) which aimed to empower local communities to manage infrastructure investments; increase local access to development resources; strengthen institutional capacity at community level; and support government strategies for decentralisation. The article goes on to look at some of the innovations in the use of participatory methodologies used in the projects, and lessons learned. It concludes with some recommendations for future CBP in Uganda such as reactivating the council as an appropriate level for managing community driven development (CDD); harmonisation of CBP and CDD approaches; the need for promotion of CBP within the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development; and the institutionalisation of an experienced CBP steering committee.

This article gives account for experiences from the Centre for Alternative Technologies (CTA), an NGO working on alternative futures for and with rural small-scale farmers in Zona da Mata of Minas Gerais, in Brazil. CTA staff work with a Local Development Plan (LDP) focussing on developing participatory Municipal Rural Development Plans (MRDP) in three municipalities: Araponga, Tombos, and Acaiaca. This article compares the three municipal planning processes, offering them as an exiting alternative methodology for local development in the Brazilian context. The article starts by describing the study area, CTA's evolution to municipal planning, and CTA's vision for pro-poor municipal planning. It goes on to explain the main building blocks of the CTA-supported MDRP, including participation as a learning process; planning process and methodology; working with new partners giving and giving farmer groups a more prominent role in the process; building accountability structures; non-neutral pro-poor facilitation; and finally learning from diversity, where the importance of differences between the participating communities are and how that forms the process are discussed. The key impacts and challenges are examined, with the problems of standardisation of methodologies in scaling-up of these types of processes. However despite many differences, several elements were found to be effective in all the three cases: the value of PRA (participatory visioning, problems appraisal and solution identification); the importance of some kind of supervision and decision making body; the needed for patience in conflict solving in the group (internally and in interaction with external parties); capacity-building of leadership, facilitation, and negotiation skills; and the need for clear facilitation at the onset of the process with a gradual transformation of the role of external bodies to advisory bodies.