Resources

In order to obtain detailed information about project participants's daily tasks, particularly in a gender context, 139 calenders were constructed for one specific day. The timeline focused on all the activities undertaken during that day, including agricultural work. Men did more agricultural work than women, although women worked harder overall. Of the 103 agricultural workers surveyed, the men spent more time with livestock, both were involved in nursery work, and men carried out slightly more work in the fields. The other projects studied were water and santitation, women's income generating projects and education. The gender difference in perception of agricultural tasks is noted, which relates closely to time spent talking, resting and in 'reproductive' chores.

It describes why and how wealth ranking was used in the early stages of a collaborative policy research and training project in Mongolia. The Policy Alternatives for Livestock Development project aims to facilitate the transition from a command to a market economy in the extensive livestock sector which dominates the Mongolian rural economy. The paper addresses the role and value of wealth ranking by card sorting in the research and training process, and its sequencing with other activities, rather than the technical details of the method itself. Wealth ranking served two principle purposes, one direct and one indirect. It enabled the team parsimoniously to target the use of other research methods in subsequent rounds of fieldwork by means of positive sampling. This paper contains sections on the following: the research context, the direct use of wealth ranking, indebtedness, availability of labour, and the indirect uses of wealth ranking.

In conferences on RRA the 'tarmac' or 'main road bias' has been frequently listed among the biases affecting outsiders' observations and perceptions of rural poverty. Referring to fieldwork carried out in the southwestern costal zone of Sri Lanka, the paper illustrates some of the misconceptions that can result from 'tarmac' bias. Using the core-periphery approach, the paper concludes that the poor may not even be found just by taking a path off the main road. Also noted is the use of housing standard as a good approximation against which to measure success in the war against roadside and other kinds of anti-poor observational bias.

From a position of disenchantment with traditional approaches to poverty measurement and alleviation, it presents an analysis of rural communities' perceptions of rural poverty as revealed through the use of PRA. The study covers three Indian villages where PRA techniques of mapping village households and land use, were used to arrive at a wealth ranking. The paper also suggests policy measures based on the rural community's perceptions. In this paper, it is observed that the villages' criteria of well-being is a much broader concept encompassing a wide range of socioeconomic and environmental aspects of living, as well as access to public services.

The paper discusses a project which aimed to acheive agricultural diversification by encouraging the production of cotton in the Gambia. An evaluation was carried out by the ODA's food strategy group in association with the Ministry of Agriculture. The object of the rapid appraisal was to identity constraints in its expansion, to examine the distribution of its benefits between and within households and to assess its potential as a cash crop alternative to groundnuts. The methodology of the appraisal is decribed, which involved investigating the organization of farm labour and technical aspects of cultivation.

Farmers have developed their own highly competant and often very technical ways of dealing with farming problems and land degredation. Such measures, for example erosion control or water channelling structure, have been developed from indigenous knowledge of the conditions, and are easily maintained by existing local skills. Here, it is recognised that the farmer has both engineering and managerial skills, which enable soil conservation measures to be carried out. The limits both to ITK and farmer innovations are also recognised, and the need for a compromise is stressed. A number of examples, on both agricultural land and types of drainage, are given, with illustrations.

A new paradigm for sustainable agriculture has emerged with the realisation of the limitations of the dominant scientific method and an increase in interest in the participation of and collaboration with the public in agriculture. This book argues that of the many forms of participation there are some that threaten rather than support sustainable agriculture. It puts forward participatory inquiry; a structured methodology used to bring about changes in problem situations that people see as improvements, portrayed as a constructive and efficient form of participation. Participatory inquiry emphasises multiple perspectives and group inquiry as opposed to simple formal questionaires as a means to participation. It also attempts to draw up a criteria for trustworthiness of collected data. The book finally argues that participatory inquiry should not be just a tool used by planners but the basis of a new professionalism in agricultural development.