Resources

The paper describes the experiences of incorporating participatory methods into strategic development planning in a rural community in Belize, Central America. The SWOT (= Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) technique was used to provide a framework for villagers to identify and assess their community's internal strengths and weaknesses and the external political and economic opportunities and threats facing them. It enabled the villagers to assess their preferred option, citrus expansion, in the light of government policy towards citrus production and trends in world prices for citrus. The paper concludes by discussing some of the limitations of the approach and how it might be improved.

This paper argues that local perceptions of poverty have tended to be used as mere additions to more conventional poverty assessments because not only do people's perceptions of poverty differ making it difficult to compare results across locations but also, little is known about how to aggregate these local perceptions to be able to estimate overall levels of poverty at regional and national levels. Work carried out in Honduras to test a methodology designed to overcome these constraints is reported on step by step in the document.

REFLECT is a structured, participatory learning process that facilitates people's critical analysis of their environment. This process is guided by local facilitators, who in the early years of REFLECT were trained on the basis of the 'REFLECT Mother Manual'. There has been debate about whether or not to use a manual at all and if so, what form it should take. This article documents recent experiences from El Salvador, whereby facilitators of participatory processes learn by experiencing, rather than by being taught. The training process is described, which encompasses an experiential learning process of learning how to train facilitators 'on the job'.

This network paper from the Rural Development Forestry Network presents two papers. The first paper ôDesigning participatory strategies for forest projects in West Africa: two case studies from Beninö, examines different approaches to achieving effective participation by local people, by contrasting two successful forestry projects in Benin. A GTZ-funded forest rehabilitation programme followed a strategy of 'working with people', creating joint activities and paid labour, while a large multilateral project, PGRN, took the approach of 'talking with people', fostering political involvement. The author argued that certain crucial factors - common interest between project staff and target groups, a clear project strategy and commitment to a long process of communication and institution building - distinguished projects in which participation was merely functional from those in which local people had a full political role in decision-making. The second paper, ôThe Monitoring Team Approach to Project Follow-up and Evaluation: Experiences from two SIDA-Funded Programmes in Central Americaö, looks at a new approach to evaluation of donor projects was described in this paper. Rather than the usual practice of one-off external evaluations, the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (SIDA) experimented with Monitoring Teams, who visited projects in Costa Rica and Nicaragua on a regular annual or biannual basis. Each visit was carried out in a standardised manner with emphasis on in-depth discussion with all stakeholders. The new approach proved well suited to the modern style of flexible, broad-based projects in which the donor has little direct involvement. Not only did the Monitoring Teams provide SIDA with an ongoing accurate picture of project performance, but the repeated visits established an iterative cycle of project improvement.