Resources

This paper describes how chapati diagramming was used with two groups at a community centre; the management committee and a Parents and Toddlers Group, to examine how each group perceived their degree of access to decision-making proesses. The author reflects on how group dynamics and unequal power relations determine what is represented. Moreover, since venn diagramming demands consensus highly individual opinions, by virtue of being represented on the diagram, can become identified as a collective representation of a particular group's 'reality' by people who did not observe the accompanying discussion process.

In 1994 Redd Barna Uganda started developing an approach to community-based planning using PRA (PRAP) that placed children and their issues at the centre of the planning process and that also aimed to recognise differences within communities. This report is based on discussions involving project staff, members of three partner organisations and villagers from seven communities. The discussion reflected on the PRAP process to examine which aspects were proving beneficial and for whom and those that were proving problematic with an aim of identifying areas for improvement.
Strategies for scaling up the work are also examined and prospects for encouraging more community based monitoring of the PRAP process as a strategy for strengthening impact.

This paper describes the work of YAKSHI, a small NGO in Andhra Pradesh, with an independant tribal peoples' mass organisation. REFLECT was only introduced after suport was given to reactivate a declining indigenous system of community interaction known as the 'Gotti'. The Gottis facilitated the introduction of participatory methodologies associated with REFLECT and ten REFLECT circles started focussing on two issues identified as local concerns : challenging the cash crop economy and looking holistically at health. In each community only a certain number of adults chose to learn literacy which in many other circumstances would have been seen as a failure. However, the article describes how participants perceived it differently, saying that it was only necessary for so many people in the community to be literate, just as it was only necessary for a few households to be able to climb palm trees to tap valuable oil. Promoting participation of women in the Gottis proved difficult initially and the paper outlines the way in which this was addressed.