Resources

A two day PRA workshop was held for staff and students from the Gandhigram Rural Institute (GRI) in Tamil Nadu, India, together with 60 women members of the village Women's Association. This report describes the PRA training activities carried out in the village, with details of timing, group organisation and methods used. Areas of priority (eg the harijan community) and PRA methods were chosen after discussion of the first day's experience. Evaluation of the workshop and of PRA makes useful suggestions for PRA training.

A PRA training workshop was organised for staff of Redd Barna-Kenya, held in their project centre. This paper describes how participants were involved in assessing their training needs and deciding upon a training schedule. "An important omission in most PRA training workshops is the necessity of the trainees' participation in the process, as opposed to merely being trained on farmers' participation." The difficulties of running a workshop in the participants' immediate place of work are also discussed.

A two week course was held for government and NGO participants in El Obeid, Sudan, to "explore some of the issues around PM&E and introduce a selection of possible PRA methods". This report briefly describes the actual course and analyses certain problem areas that arose - attitude to villagers, use of symbols and the difficulty of focusing on PM&E within a PRA course. Tools found most useful for evaluation were: impact diagrams, impact matrices and evaluation matrices (visual examples of each are given). Participants were asked to give a personal evaluation of the course using symbols only.

This humorous account describes a field visit with District Officers in India, where the technique of "shoulder tapping" was used to interrupt officers who tried to give advice to the farmers. The actual dialogue shows the way in which the officers' assumptions were challenged by the farmers they met.

A major part of this twelve day workshop was spent in fieldwork, using the PRA techniques (listed in Section II) learnt in theory classes. This report describes in detail the methodology and findings of the field exercises, showing clearly the practical problems encountered (such as how to "reach" the women) as well as the lively and diverse information that can emerge from PRA activities. The fieldwork in Chimontu and Chongwe resulted in two methodological innovations : i) the seasonality analysis of illness was combined with trend analysis to show how illness had changed over ten years ii) the institutional diagram was used to show what the group would like to see in the area. Points about location of fieldwork, timing, structure of training and group composition conclude this report. The appendices include an interesting list of participants' concerns after completing the fieldwork, plus the actual visual results of the PRA activities.

A comprehensive and clear guide to training, with techniques aimed at all types of participatory training. It opens with a discussion of some concepts commonly considered as 'participation', and discusses their perceptions of participation and the ideas behind participatory training. This is contrasted with traditional teaching methods. All stages are discussed - from the planning and design of the workshop to techniques available. This is exemplified by field examples. The bulk of the book is devoted to short descriptions of different training methods. These include ways of forming groups and ways of 'waking' participants up during long sessions. There are also details of different techniques which can be used to introduce the concepts of participation and dialouge, such as Johari's window, and other behavioural 'games'. Each technique is clearly illustrated, with diagrammes and focusing on visual and participatory methods.

This manual is aimed primarily at NGOs and assumes that trainers have a prior knowledge of PRA techniques. The first section deals with how to plan and organise a training course in PRA, suggesting a set of questions, the ten steps of planning and giving checklists for planning, for materials and examples of warm-ups. The second section describes the individual training sessions in detail, covering the theoretical background to PRA (including PRA versus other research techniques) and a session on each PRA technique introduced. Each method is accompanied by handouts that could be photocopied, suggested activities and hints for the trainer. Particular emphasis is placed on PRA as part of a project planning process, suggesting an "innovation assessment and sustainability matrix" exercise. General fieldwork guidelines are included, but no detail of how to carry out individual activities in the field.