Resources

A two day workshop was held for men and women of various village institutions in Gujarat, India to raise gender awareness through PRA. Training methods used included discussion of local proverbs in separate groups of men and women (e.g. Women's brain lies under the feet) and participants being asked to run to a section of the room according to whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement. A daily activities profile was constructed then divided according to Moser's categories of reproductive, productive and social work. The workshop ended with a film on women's issues and development of Broad Action Plans by the villages concerned. This report contains details of the actual dialogue and discussion that took place during the above activities.

The report of a training carried out by Myrada, a pre-training course conducted by Myrada and detailed reports in both Khmer and English of a field PRA conducted in Pursat are included in this document. The training followed the pattern of introduction to PRA and development and the tools. There was a field training in one village near to Pursat with a relatively stable security situation. The different stages in the PRA are noted, along with training notes and illustrations. The pretraining is included to give an idea of the information participants received prior to the training, such as the relationship between PRA and Concerns projects, and why an understanding of PRA would be useful to Concern, as well as some information on PRA tools. Concern has subsequently been using PRA in its development work, and the case study illustrates one example of its use.

A seven day workshop focusing on participatory methods for community development was held in Natal, South Africa. The workshop used the SARAR approach, which 'aims to support the growth of self-esteem by facilitating 'learning events' which encourage people to develop their creative and analytic capacity to identify and solve problems'. Using methods similar to PRA, such as community mapping, the facilitators tried to address issues around gender conflict. This account analyses how the workshop went wrong : the relationship between facilitators (white women) and the largely male black participants broke down completely due to underlying racial and gender tensions, and also the 'inflexibility' of the programme. Intensely personal reflections by the facilitators on their roles reveal the 'many layers of gender dynamics' and the implicit power issues in outsiders trying to initiate such discussions through 'top-down and academic methods'. Finally, the facilitators analyze how they could have learned to welcome the knowledge brought by the 'disturbers' (the men who 'resisted' the workshop) and the 'shadow' side of creativity and participation.

The paper discusses the use and usefulness of participatory approaches in the work of Save the Children Fund (SCF). It asks how PRA can be used effectively by SCF when the nature of its work means it is unlikely to be involved purely as a facilitator in a community development process. Areas where PRA has proved useful are research, training and awareness, and participatory monitoring and evaluation. It is suggested that the awareness and skills of a growing number of staff members will gradually increase SCFs capacity to use PRA. Participatory methods are also seen as having a useful role to play in turning SCF into a more child-focused agency, and in helping to develop partnerships between SCF, local communities and partner organisations.

Outlines the process of transforming RIPS, a Finnish-funded bi-regional integrated rural development programme in Tanzania. An eighteen month process was planned to transform the programme's previous top-down blueprint approach to one based on mutual learning and action research together with local people. Participation and sustainability were the key requirements. The various stages of the process and the problems encountered are described. It is concluded that "the process demands attitude change from many, creativity from project staff, patience and commitment from local people, and some rethinking of what projects are for from central authorities and donor agencies".

This article presents a critique of an agency study which used rapid research methods to investigate the role and consequences of structural adjustment programmes and the introduction of a multi-party system in Tanzania. The authors compare the findings of the agency study to their own village-level studies. They argue that the genuinely poor were not included in the analysis by the agency study team, thereby casting doubt on the study's provisional findings that 'trade liberalization has been good for rural people'. They suggest that special efforts need to be made to ensure that 'the unseen and unknown' come to the fore when using rapid research methods.

The article focuses on the generation of knowledge about social relationships within participatory rural development projects. In the Kribhco Indo-British Rainfed Farming Project (KRIBP) in India significant constraints were experienced in using PRA techniques for social analysis. Although they were successful at generating agro-ecological information, they were less helpful in revealing the structures of power and influence within a village or in helping project workers identify the social relations which shaped 'public' opinion. It is unlikely that public participatory research methods will prove good instruments for the analysis of local power relations since they are shaped by the very social relations which are being investigated. In fact, an understanding of local social networks is a necessary prerequisite for the organisation of effective PRA based work. In KRIBP understanding of these relations came from participant observation and critical review of the PRA activity itself rather than from the use of PRA methods.