This is a course guide which consists of five workshops of 3 days each learning about community development in a participatory way.
The reliability of food security rating was tested in a rural area of Honduras. 20 workshop were conducted aomng members of producer associations. Measures of interrater agreement suggest the method is not highly reliable. The authors put forward six different hypotheses to explain the poor reliability of the rating method. they also suggest future research directions.
This video records a step in the process of opening up cities to children's participation in assessing and improving the urban environment. It records the firs-ever workshop in South Africa at which children from a Johannesburg squatter camp join urban policy makers and planners, NGOs and donor agencies to discuss problem areas in their lives and how these could be improved.
The village immersion programme for the World Bank staff is atrining programme for executives entrusted with development transactions. It entails not mere spot visits, but staying in the village, not mere conversation with people, but comprehension of their culture and economy and not mere exposure to the rural scene, but immersion in their life and work. The booklet contains a report of immersion visits and reflections from Bank staff and facilitators.
Newletter from the Squatter and Urban Poor Federation. Run by women and men who live in Phnom Penh's poor settlements, it SUPF works to get communities to come together and work out their own solutions to problems they all face, problems of land, evictions, houses, toilets, basic services, savings and credit.
Participatory need assessment study which sought to understand the actual needs from the perception of colony-dwellers for an urban community development programme.
Drafted at the global REFLECT conference in Orissa, this is a list of ideas for a training facilitator so that both facilitator and participants can reflect upon their experiences and draw learning for change.
This book describes the experiences of Padek, an interntional development organisation, in introducing self-help savings and credit groups in Cambodia. They meet regularly estalbish their own rules and elect their own leaders. The program is presented in sufficient detail that readers could implement similar programs if they are interested. It looks at two years of experience of group initiation, stabilization and consolidation and then draws out issues and looks to the future.
Despite the increase in the number of NGOs and in participatory methodologies and after many years of poverty alleviation, poverty continues to be rife and communities continue to languish in it. There is no doubt, then, that something is wrong. It must either be that NGOs and or participatory methodologies - the tools of their trade - are ineffective, or that NGOs use participatory methodologies wrongly.
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Farmer Field Schools have now been conducted in over 20,000 villages in Indonesia and other countries in the South. This report gives details of what an IPM School is, how they are initiated, emerging results, key IPM principles and consolidation of farmer based IPM. It also looks beyond the schools themselves to the potential of initiatives such as farmer to farmer training programmes and using IPM for other crops.
A compilation of four reports from the Institute for Development Research: "Ideology and Political Economy in Inquiry: Action Research and Participatory Research" by LD Brown and R Tandon; "People-Centered Development and Participatory Research" by LD Brown; "Participatory Research and Community Planning" by LD Brown; "Building Capacity Through Action Learning" by M Leach.
CDE was recently commissioned by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) to analyse the gender sensitivity of its agricultural operation. It's analysis showed that few programmes were adequately designed to address gender issues appropriately and even fewer included strategies for the monitoring of the most basic issues in gender-balanced development. This document outlines some basic concepts in gender-balanced development, sustainable land management and participatory methodologies and goes on to look at six key issues: local stakeholders and decision making processes; access to and control over land; division of labour and responsibilities; conflicts of interest over land use; knowledge and skills and external influences and support. Finally some implications for field activities are considered. The document is intended as a tool to initiate debate and to lead to the development of more precise and operational tools and guidelines.
This training manual is part of the "Internal Learning System" which is a participatory monitoring and evaluation system for grassroots livelihoods and micro-finance programmes, developed in India. Accompanying the member level diary, this manual gives pictorial direction of a series of exercises for member training meetings. It includes topics such as looking at socio-economic conditions, collecting and analysing data and using loans effectively.
The Mahaweli Authority Sri Lanka was established to implement the largest multi-purpose Integrated Development Programme ever launched in the country. It is responsible for engineering construction work as well as the establishment of human settlements providing irrigation facilities, social infrastructure, post settlement services, maintenance and management of the settlements and their infrastructure. The MASL system has traditionally had a topdown approach which has contributed to dependancy as well as incurring a high financial cost. Since 1994 the MASL strategy has aimed at a gradual transfer of management of settlements to farmer organisations, thereby overcoming dependancy through empowerment of the farmers, using participatory methods. This has required time, and attitude and behavioral changes at all levels of MASL. This seminar paper details the MASL system and the move towards a sustainable management system based on farmer participation.
A short report on the Tyranny of Participation Conference held in Manchester, 3 November 1998. An introduction details emerging issues and is followed by a look at the role of individual actors and their networks in processes of institutionalisation, the question of what constitutes evidence, the implications of decentralisation on democracy and governance and finally at ways to move understanding forward. The event is summed up as one which "served to confirm our impression that there is a real need for engaged, theoretically informed reflection on particpatory work and of the importance of finding an inclusive medium for bringing practitioners into the debate".