Resources

This article begins with a brief discussion of the links between the concepts of participation and social exclusion. Brief histories of three government programmes in the United States which have attempted to use participation to address poverty and social exclusion are then given. Themes emerging from these histories are outlined and their possible relevance for the South, as participation is increasingly used as an institutonalised strategy for addressing poverty.

'Voices of the Poor' is a series of three books that collates the experiences, views and aspirations of over 60,000 poor women and men. This second book of the series draws material from a 23-country comparative study, which used open-ended participatory methods, bringing together the voices and realities of 20,000 poor women, men, youth and children. Despite very different political, social and economic contexts, there are striking similarities in poor people's experiences. The common underlying theme is one of powerlessness, which consists of multiple and interlocking dimensions of illbeing or poverty. The book starts by describing the origins of the study, the methodology and some of the challenges faced. This is followed by an exploration of the multidimensional nature of wellbeing and illbeing. Most of the book comprises the core findings - the 10 dimensions of powerlessness and illbeing that emerge from the study - and is organised around these themes. These include livelihoods and assets; the places where poor people live and work; the body and related to this, accessing health services; gender roles and gender relations within the household; social exclusion; insecurity and related fears and anxieties; the behaviour and character of institutions; and poor people's ratings of the most important institutions in their lives. These dimensions are brought together into a many-stranded web of powerlessness, which is compounded by the lack of capability, including lack of information, education, skills and confidence. The final chapter is a call to action and dwells on the challenge of change.

This booklet describes the genesis, progress and evaluation of five women's participation projects that took place in Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Zambia and Uganda between 1996 and 1999. These projects were organised by the Active Learning Centre (a Scottish-based development organisation that works for peoples' rights through education and training) and local NGOs. The overall aim of the booklet is to identify lessons learned and good practice in developing women's participation. The first section argues that the wider dimensions of poverty encapsulated in the concept of social exclusion are useful to understanding women's poverty and the underlying social relations that contribute to women's deprivation. A contrast is drawn between a gender and rights approach to tackling women's poverty, highlighting their respective useful aspects. The use of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) as the key document for the training of trainers and local community education activities is described. The second section presents an overview of women's legal rights within the project countries and highlights some of the main areas of discrimination. It includes examples of reforms seeking to provide greater equality for women. The next section focuses on the development and execution of the women's participation projects, describing their models of operation and organisation, and providing examples of group work activities. It concludes with a series of seven case studies illustrating different aspects of the work of the projects and some of the lessons learned. The fourth section provides examples of the systems used for monitoring and evaluating each stage of the project. The final section reflects on lessons learned, identifying good practices in women's participation projects.

This is a resource book designed primarily for development workers working within the field of the rural poor. It describes a range of first-hand experiences with participatory approaches in the context of projects funded by The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and governments in Asia and the Pacific. The book is divided into a number of sections. Part One examines poverty and participation and explains why the poor should be targeted and in what ways this is possible. Part Two describes in detail the actual participatory approaches. Part three concentrates on participation in the project planning and implementation stage. Part Four assesses the monitoring impact and Part Five examines issues in participation with regards to institutions, partnerships and governance.

This article gives account for experiences from the Centre for Alternative Technologies (CTA), an NGO working on alternative futures for and with rural small-scale farmers in Zona da Mata of Minas Gerais, in Brazil. CTA staff work with a Local Development Plan (LDP) focussing on developing participatory Municipal Rural Development Plans (MRDP) in three municipalities: Araponga, Tombos, and Acaiaca. This article compares the three municipal planning processes, offering them as an exiting alternative methodology for local development in the Brazilian context. The article starts by describing the study area, CTA's evolution to municipal planning, and CTA's vision for pro-poor municipal planning. It goes on to explain the main building blocks of the CTA-supported MDRP, including participation as a learning process; planning process and methodology; working with new partners giving and giving farmer groups a more prominent role in the process; building accountability structures; non-neutral pro-poor facilitation; and finally learning from diversity, where the importance of differences between the participating communities are and how that forms the process are discussed. The key impacts and challenges are examined, with the problems of standardisation of methodologies in scaling-up of these types of processes. However despite many differences, several elements were found to be effective in all the three cases: the value of PRA (participatory visioning, problems appraisal and solution identification); the importance of some kind of supervision and decision making body; the needed for patience in conflict solving in the group (internally and in interaction with external parties); capacity-building of leadership, facilitation, and negotiation skills; and the need for clear facilitation at the onset of the process with a gradual transformation of the role of external bodies to advisory bodies.

This article focuses on the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP), which is a national development strategy of the Ugandan government that has recently undergone its second revision. The revision process involves government, donors, civil society, the private sector and poor-people. This article offers a description of the mechanisms of the PEAP and poverty trends in Uganda, and introduces two themed articles about monitoring, evaluation and implementation of the PEAP process (by the same authors). The first looks at these issues from a civil society perspective (Isooba); the second form a government perspective (Ssewakiryanga).