Participatory Tools

When we use Participatory Approaches, we need particular methods to work with stakeholders and increase their sense of ownership. We call these methods “tools” because, like any other tool-kit, they do not provide the solutions in themselves, but do provide us with ways to reach the solutions. The tools we use help us to communicate in better ways with stakeholders and assist stakeholders to share their information and understanding with us. With experience, we learn to use the right tool in the right circumstances, and to develop new tools to meet our particular needs in different circumstances. The tools we use are accessible, any of the people we are working with are not literate, then we do not use tools which involve writing or reading skills. We might use drawing, model-making or symbols instead.

The types of methods used in PRA are largely a more participatory mode. Some of the “menu” of methods of PRA are:

• Secondary sources-such as files, maps, aerial photographs, articles and books;
• Do-it-yourself-asking to be taught to perform village tasks e.g. transplanting weeding, ploughing etc.
• Key informants-enquiring who are the experts and seeking them out;
• Semi-structured interview –it can entail having a mental or written cheklist, but being open-ended and following up on the unexpected;
• Groups of various kinds (causal, specialist/focus, deliberately structured, community/ neighbourhood);
• Sequences or chains of interviews-from group to group or from group to key informant;
• They do it-villages and village residents as investigators and researchers-women, poor people, volunteers etc.;
• Participatory mapping and modeling, in which people use the ground, floor or paper to make social, demographic, health or farm maps;
• Participatory analysis of aerial photography;
• Transect walks-systematically walk with informants through an area, observing, asking, listening, discussing, seeking problems, solutions and opportunities;
• Time lines-chronologies of events, listing major remembered dates in a village;
• Trend analysis-people’s accounts of the past, or how things close to them have changed e.g. customs and practices;
• Livelihood analysis-stability, crises and coping, relative income, expenditure, credit and debt;
• Wellbeing or wealth ranking-indentifying clusters of households according to wellbeing or wealth;
• Analysis of difference-especially by gender, social group, wealth/poverty, occupation and age;
• Key local indicators-such as poor people’s criteria of wellbeing,
• Participatory planning, budgeting and monitoring-in which villagers prepare their own plans, budgets and schedules, and monitor progress.