Resources

In this article, the authors recount the experiences of an NGO, Nepal Water for Health (NEWAH), in helping the community of Lele Mahadev Khola village to manage their water system through maintenance and funding. The activities carried out by the NGO through PAR is detailed with insights on what the PAR approach has been able to achieve.

The article describes the state of the water management system in Pakora, Pakistan when the PAR team made forays to assess the situation. Information on the process adopted by the PAR team is recounted and the response from the community is included on key issues such as the committee and transparency and record keeping. The article concludes by providing evidence of improvements to the water management system and assessing the gains made by the community.

This book is a collection of selected papers by Anil C. Shah. The book spans the worlds of Government and civil society over a lengthy career working with the poor and marginalised.

It covers a wide range of activities based on direct personal experience and innovation in the field. It contains a mixture of short personal articles and longer, broader and more detailed articles.

The work is presented from a variety of contexts ranging from government administration to NGO's, from community development to joint forest management, from watershed development to participatory irrigation management, and from behaviour, attitudes and training to influencing and changing policy.

In recent years the "development" industry has began to incorporate into its vocabulary notions about the "empowerment of the poor," "participatory democracy," "gender in development" etc. as part of a strategy for poverty alleviation in the developing world. This paper critically examines the notion of participation as the basis of empowerment in the context of a joint CanadianûGhanaian financed rural development project in the Northern Region of Ghana, NORRIP (Northern Region Rural Integrated Programme), including aspects of the IVWP (integrated Village Water Project. The paper argues that because of the inherent goodness of the notion of participation, it has become a substitute for the structural reforms needed for social change. The paper raises questions not just about the terms and mode of participation but further points out that reference to the term "village" or "community" as the basis of participation is simplistic and problematic. The paper also questions the feasibility of the institutional and administrative structures within which such concepts may be realized and makes the case that a focus on local participation and empowerment can provide the state with a legitimate opportunity for shirking its responsibilities by dumping them on local areas, even though those areas lack the resources needed.