One important aspect not considered up to now:

-> While PRA helps us see patterns in ‘static’ entities/realities, we have not yet looked at either relationships or systems of management. Can PRA methods help in this kind of understanding also?

THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPMENT STARTS WITH REFLECTION. PRA DEFINITELY HELPS TO START THIS PROCESS OFF WITH THE PEOPLE WITH WHOM WE ARE WORKING.

In the afternoon, some groups departed on a Transects exercise as outlined on Page 8, while others looked at the subjects of women’s time use, and home gardens. The presentations that followed were not made in the village but back at the Training Centre.

Some points that emerged were:

• In most cases the exercise was represented in the form of area maps rather than transect diagrams.

• Groups that did not have an experienced leader felt very much handicapped and unclear about the whole exercise. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why area maps were produced rather than transect diagrams.

• With the women’s time use exercise there was the issue of how women tell time. In the absence of clocks, what reference points do they make use of to tell time? This issue was not addressed.

At the end of the day there was a brief reflection on the usefulness of the methods learnt. PRA helps us go beyond data collection and into processes. It is a methodology for learning rather than information gathering. Perhaps it should be named something else? Mr.Fernandez suggested that we could rename it.

P A L M

Participatory Learning Methods

A short time in the morning was spent in discussing the Do’s and Don’ts of interviewing. A long list developed, the central theme of which was that the relationship between the Interviewer and Interviewee is absolutely crucial to the outcome of the interview and care should go into seeing that a positive relationship is established. One other point was that in the case of using PRA methods where so much flexibility and room for improvisation is present, one decision that the interviewer may want to take beforehand is whether the interview has to be with an individual or a group.

The nature of groups was also very briefly touched upon, and distinctions were made between Casual, Specialist, Structured and Community groups.

Crucial questions in working with groups:
* Who is not present here who should have been present?
* Why not?

The next session went into an explanation of the method of WEALTH RANKING and LIVELIHOOD ANALYSIS. While doing a livelihood analysis would give us insights into the way people manage their lives, wealth ranking was a good way of finding out how people from the village itself would rank their population as rich, middle and poor, and what criteria they would use to make the distinctions.

Wealth Ranking : The Procedure

• Decide upon the community that you want to do the ranking for (A size of 50-100 families would be ideal; otherwise the village may have to be covered part by part).

• Make a list of all the households in the village by name.

• Find a key informant who is familiar with all the households in the village. (Data can be corrected, but a knowledgeable person is important).

• Choose a place that is quiet and undisturbed to work in.

• Spend a little time building up a relationship with the informant.

• Explain the exercise to him/her without creating any anxiety, and making sure that the exercise is properly understood.

• Have ready with you slips of paper on which the names of the households have been written. Each household must be written on a separate slip of paper so that there are as many slips as families in the village.

• Read each name aloud, hand over the slip to the informant, and ask him/her to put it into one of the economic categories where he/she thinks the family will fit. (If the informant wishes to make more than three categories, that is fine, but ask why.)

• Do not push for results or subject the informant to any kind of embarrassment.

• Note down all final responses as well as the informant’s reasons for making them.

• For the purposes of checking out, repeat the exercise with another informant in the same way.

Following the briefing, 8 groups once again left for 2 villages, Marur and Mudianur, to do the wealth ranking and livelihood analysis exercises.

Presentation of findings was done in the late evening. Some examples of findings are as follows:

- In one group, the villagers’ own criteria for making the distinction between rich, in-between, and poor were:

- In more than one group, after the families were divided into 3 categories the informants felt compelled to further sub-divide them into a total of 6 categories starting from wealthiest to poorest.

- In one group, for reasons that are not clear, the informant, after himself establishing the criteria for classification, placed 6 people under ‘rich’ and one person under ‘doubtful’ at first count; at second count the numbers were changed to 3 under ‘rich’ and 14 under ‘doubtful’. This made the group question the validity of findings obtained in this way.

Comments on the day’s work:

• All groups showed good teamwork. But perhaps more than 4 members in a team would have been too much. Between 4 members tasks and responsibilities were evenly shared so that some were interviewing, others documenting, and yet others taking note of the process.

• Only one group had done the wealth ranking using the ‘traditional’ method of talking to one informant only in private. Another group manoeuvred to interview an individual in seclusion, but later repeated the exercise with a large group of 26 people. All other groups did the exercise in public with much discussion among the villagers. Dr.Chambers explained that this was the first time in his experience that the exercise had been done with a group.

• One of the groups did the exercise with a group of women only, which was also the first time that such a thing had been attempted.

• It was observed that working with individuals was much quicker than working with groups. Could it also be considered to yield more accurate results? Doing it in a group could mean that social relationships would have a good chance of influencing outcomes.

• The value of drawing up the list of names in the village versus going into the village with a list drawn up previously by someone not familiar with all families was an issue that had to be examined. In this case, the lists had already been drawn up and farmers faced the problem of identifying several names either because they were known as something else in the village or because we were pronouncing the names wrongly, or because there were several people with the same names who could only be identified by naming their fathers/husbands also and this detail had been left out.

• The livelihood analysis demonstrated amazing coping mechanisms among the poor.

• It was observed that wealth-ranking could very well be used as a springboard for other discussions such as finding out the characteristics of poverty according to rural people, tracing development trends, etc.

• In the livelihood analysis as well as wealth ranking, health issues seemed to have been left out from all mention whereas in fact they have been demonstrated to have an important effect on the lives of the poor. It would perhaps be worth probing into this area.

• The use of diagrams both in eliciting information from the people and making the presentations was appreciated.

This day was allocated for participants to choose any topic of their choice and make an investigation into it using PRA methods. However, before leaving for the field, each group also had to write up the processes they had observed and experienced while doing the wealth ranking and livelihood analysis. (These write-ups have not been attached to this report)

For the field exercise, topics that were chosen were:

1) Livestock feeding: resources and management practices.
2) Migration.
3) Trees.
4) Assessment of changes in well bring among people.
5) Non-farm activities.
6) Literacy.

Presentations were scheduled for the following day.

Morning until teatime was spent in making presentations of the previous day’s work.

Comments on the work turned out:

· The topical PRAs had succeeded in generating plenty of good leads for further investigation. For e.g. the Literacy group had elicited the information that in 3 out of 7 families IRDP loans had resulted in one child being taken out of school in order to look after the animals purchased. Was this a fact in all cases? Was IRDP being merely stated as an excuse?

· Another piece of information was that by giving youngsters an education the families were actually losers because they either left the village, or did not contribute any money to the family, or felt ashamed of the traditional occupations practiced in their families. How widespread would this be?

· The groups had been very creative in using methods of eliciting information. To go back to the literacy group again, their method of selecting families to be interviewed had been to make a participatory social map of the locality, ask the villagers to name the families that had the characteristics that they wanted to investigate into, (e.g. a family with one child going to school and another not; a family with educated female children, and so on) and mark their houses on the map.

· Doing a time line with a family to study changes in well-being had yielded a very powerful case study which was not only of academic interest but also made an impact on the team doing the interviewing and renewed their motivation to continue working in the field of development.

· On occasion it seemed a good strategy to work backwards from a concrete point in the present. For e.g. the trees group had started by asking the informant how many trees there were in his village at present, how many were there five years ago, and five years before that and so on.

· One group learnt that some interviews could be very painful and embarrassing both for the Interviewer and Interviewee. This was particularly so in the case of poor families who did not want to talk about their poverty. The group looking at changes in well being found one informant closing up when the questions got personal. It was best to terminate such interviews.

· The usefulness of Matrix Ranking (3)  to establish priorities was pointed out.

· Diagrammatic representation of materials was appreciated. However, there were occasional instances where the diagram chosen was not appropriate for the information to be presented. For e.g. the group dealing with migration used a single graph line to depict the pattern of migrating both across the last fifty years and over the months of any single year.

The results are as follows:

The discussion suggested that care should be taken to see that diagrams are not likely to cause confusion, to mislead, or be misinterpreted.

• Dr.Chambers cautioned that triangulation is very important for PRA and so we had to be aware that the present exercise was purely exploratory - it could not be used as a basis for planning; it could only be used as a basis for further investigation into any of the number of leads that had been thrown up.

From Dr.Chambers: A few additional points before closing:

• Many PRA methods have not yet been covered in this workshop. E.g. The value of doing something yourself - like ploughing a field or sitting at a potter’s wheel - in order to find out more about it, or doing chains of interviews, or using local people to do their own research and then reporting back.

• The method of contrast comparisons was briefly explained, where one group analyses the behaviour of another group that is different to them. E.g. a group of farmers not using improved ragi seeds may be asked why they think another group of farmers is using them.

• A slide was used to point out how aerial photographs could be an extremely useful basis for discussions. A top-view could show patterns and impacts in a way that interviews would not be able to demonstrate. However, aerial photographs as a means of information gathering was not yet in popular use in India, though it was beginning to be used extensively in several other developing countries.

• There are many more diagrams whose uses this workshop had not been able to demonstrate. E.g. pie charts, Venn diagrams, etc.

• While it was true to say that several other methods had not been demonstrated, it was also true that new methods were being ‘invented’ every day by practitioners. It had to become our responsibility to write up our experiences so that learnings could be shared with all who were interested.

• Practitioners of PRA could also think in terms of developing techniques to close groups (i.e. to keep people out when their presence was unnecessary or distracting). Many times, interviews required an individual or a small group, but there would be a crowd both looking on and interrupting.

• Finally, a list of sources of PRA literature was circulated to all participants. Much of it was available free of cost. Participants were asked to both write and obtain the materials as well as to contribute articles to them for a wider reach.

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