Resources

This describes a Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) undertaken by the Government of Kenya and the World Bank during Febuary-April 1994. It had three primary objectives; to understand poverty from the perspective of the poor, to start a process of dialogue between policy makers, district level providers and the poor and to address the issue of the 'value added' of the PPA approach to understanding poverty. Methods used included mapping, wealth ranking, seasonal analysis, trend and price analysis, focus group discussions, key informant interviews; visual card methods, gender analysis, understanding health seeking behaviour; and incomplete sentences. Statistically the findings of the PPA and the Welfare Monitoring Survey based on an established poverty line were strikingly similar. The study also found a gap in the perception of poverty between the poor themselves and district officials. Separate chapters look at poverty in urban Nairobi and Mandera district.

Many microfinance organisations are concerned about reaching the poorest sections of society, and are prepared to carry out screening procedures to identify these people. This article describes a pilot study to compare two such screening methods, the Visual Indicators of Poverty (VIP) test and the Participatory Wealth Ranking process (PWR), which have been used by the Small Enterprise Foundation in South Africa. A study is described which demonstrates the inaccuracy of VIP, a system based on static, externally judged criteria, when compared to PWR, which uses local knowledge of individual poverty. The article also focuses on some of the challenges faced in designing a cost-effective operational system based on participatory mapping and wealth ranking.

Understanding the allocation of public resources through national and local budgets has become an increasing focus of development. This has been driven by two principal trends. Donor agencies, on the one hand, are seeking to deliver growing proportions of their financial assistance to partner countries through mainstream government systems - while, at a different level, a vibrant civil society movement has developed which seeks to promote goals of citizen empowerment, gender equity and poverty reduction through the potentials offered by the budget process. Norton and Elson aim to contribute to the evolving understanding of public expenditure management as a political, rather than a purely technical, process. In particular, they explore the ways in which a rights approach can contribute to strengthening voice and pro-poor outcomes in budget processes, and include examples of pro-poor and gender-sensitive budget initiatives from countries such as Brazil and South Africa. The work was commissioned by DFID as part of the programme of work to take forward it's human rights strategy, and identifies issues, partners, tools and methods that may help development actors to support citizen accountability and a pro-poor, gender-equitable, focus in public expenditure management.