Local people can generate their own numbers – and the statistics that result are powerful for them and can influence policy. Since the early 1990’s there has been a quiet tide of innovation in generating statistics using participatory methods. Across all sectors from local to national, participatory statistics are being generated in the design, monitoring and evaluation, and impact assessment of development interventions. This book, by describing policy, programme and project research, aims to provide impetus for the adoption and mainstreaming of participatory statistics within international development practice. It lays down the challenge of institutional change that allows a win-win outcome in which statistics are part of an empowering process for local people and a valuable information flow for those open to it in aid agencies and government departments.
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This paper explores how outcome measurement is understood in several SDC local governance programmes, reviewed in a HELVETAS Learning Project. This critical review assesses the extent to which power issues are recognised, understood and tracked within such programmes and suggests ways to enhance this. This includes being clear about what power and empowerment mean in a particular context, how the way power is implicitly understood in local government programmes can lead to a focus only the more formal and visible dimensions of power, and how the complexity of power means that a more clearly articulated and power-aware theory of change underpinning the intervention is needed.
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Like other agencies involved in international development cooperation, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) is committed to enhancing its results orientation, learning and effectiveness through more responsive and accountable programming. Encouraging a culture in which citizens participate in the planning, monitoring and evaluation of programmes and country strategies is essential for achieving these aims. This note is about SDC’s experience with beneficiary assessment (BA), an evaluation approach used to increase its responsiveness and accountability to the citizens who are the intended direct and indirect beneficiaries of its work. It aims to both raise awareness of the potential advantages of using Beneficiary Assessment to enhance learning, responsiveness, accountability and effectiveness, and to contribute to enhancing capacity and confidence to use BA in the evaluation of projects, programmes and country strategies by providing practical orientation and support.
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With the priority of poverty reduction and with accelerating change in many dimensions, up-to-date and realistically informed perceptions of the lives and conditions of people living in poverty have come to matter more than ever. At the same time, new pressures and incentives increasingly trap decision-makers in headquarters and capital cities, reinforcing earlier (1983) analysis of the attraction of urban 'cores' and the neglect of rural 'peripheries'. These trends make decision-makers' learning about poverty and from people living in poverty rarer and ever more important. One common means has been rural development tourism, the phenomenon of the brief rural visit from an urban centre. In 1983, six biases of such visits - spatial, project, person, seasonal, diplomatic and professional - against seeing, meeting and learning from the poorer people, were identified and described. Security can now be added as a seventh. Much can be done to offset the biases. The solution is to make more visits, not fewer, and to enjoy doing them better.
In addition, new and promising approaches have been pioneered for experiential, direct learning, face-to-face with poor and marginalised people. Examples are: UNHCR's annual participatory assessments by staff; SDC's 'views of the poor' participatory research in Tanzania; and various forms of immersion, most recently those being convened and organised by ActionAid International. In many immersions, outsiders become guests for a few days and nights, and live, experience and learn in a community. The question now is not how an organisation can afford the time and other resources for immersions for its staff. It is how, if it is seriously pro-poor, it can possibly not do so. This paper is a challenge to development actors to practice a responsible pro-poor professionalism; to be pioneers and champions, seizing and making space for themselves and others to offset the biases and traps of headquarters and capital cities; and to have the vision and guts to seek out direct experiential learning and so to be in touch and up-to-date with the realities of the people living in poverty whom they seek to serve.
Yoland Wadsworth’s proposition is that the act of inquiry is the way by which every living organism and all collective human life goes about continuously learning, improving and changing. This book explores this approach, a basic theory of human understanding and action. By delving into the cyclical processes of acting, observing, questioning, feeling, reflecting, thinking, planning and acting again, the author identifies how new life might be brought to what we do, both professionally and personally. She also emphasises that the evaluative process needs to drive progress towards social justice and human betterment.