Participatory rural appraisal tools techniques

While RRA mainly aims at extracting information, Participatory Rural Appraisal emphasizes empowering local people to assume an active role in analyzing their own living conditions, problems, and potentials in order to seek a change in their situations. These changes are supposed to be achieved by collective action, and the local communities are invited to assume responsibilities for implementing many, if not most, of the activities. The members of the Participatory Rural Appraisal team act as facilitators.

Therefore an important principle of Participatory Rural Appraisal is to share the results of the analysis between the Participatory Rural Appraisal team and the community members by visualization, public presentations, and discussions during meetings. Regardless of whether it is carried out as part of project identification or appraisal or as part of country economic and sector work, the learning by doing and teamwork spirit of Participatory Rural Appraisal requires transparent procedures.

For that reason, a series of open meetings initial, final, follow-up generally frame the sequence of Participatory Rural Appraisal activities.

Other tools common in PRA are:. A typical Participatory Rural Appraisal activity involves a team of people working for two to three weeks on workshop discussions, analyses, and fieldwork. Several organizational aspects should be considered:. It is a measure of relative importance of issues and thus helps in obtaining data from respondents in relative terms.

The making of maps that depicts conditions and environment of the area is called mapping. It increases the knowhow of the natives about their surrounding and the physical features of the area. Consists of household information such as population density, social classes, land use etc. Contains information about physical features of the area, crops grown in the area, population and infrastructure facilities present in the area.

Skip to main content. Search form Search. PRA Tools and Techniques. Other tools common in PRA are: 1. Diagramming a. Transect Walk Transects are observatory walks to study the natural resources, topography, indigenous technology, soils and vegetation, farming practices, problems and opportunities. Venn diagram It is used to depict key institutions, organizations and individuals and their relationship with the local community or others. Daily Routine Charts It is used to identify daily routine pattern of either gender in a particular area.

It helps: To identify the gender roles. To document the timings of the activities. For discussion of new activities and their implications for time use. For discussing time of meetings and training sessions To illustrate mobility and periods spent away from home. Flow Diagram Flow diagrams discover and analyze impacts and linkages. Mapping Maps are used to identify the comparative location and importance of different resources with in an area.

I facilitated these to be divided into different groups according to their socio-economic conditions. Through this process the participants of all three villages divided themselves into four groups: rich or well-off, middle class, poor and extreme poor. The participants of Bonna and Sidr village preferred to rank to the category well-off instead of rich. They argued that though the rich people have more assets compared to other social groups the rich people are also vulnerable to disasters.

The participants chose the criteria for wellbeing ranking based on local level assets. These importantly also exposed pride and prejudices as well as thoughts about protection from disaster losses and damage. The indicators referred to included amount of cultivable land; housing condition and number of bedrooms; availability of livelihoods; ownership of a boat, tube well and sanitary. The summary of wellbeing analysis done by the participants of Bonna village is attached as Appendix 4.

This participatory technique explores seasonal constraints and opportunities by diagramming changes month by month throughout the year ibid. This tool is used as a cross-check technique to confirm that names of months are in common. It can be conducted by asking people to use pieces of stick, draw histograms in the dust or with chalk or make piles of stones, seeds or powders.

This is used to represent relative quantities and patterns of rainfall, soil moisture, crops, livestock agricultural and non- agricultural labour, diet, food consumption, illnesses, prices, animal fodder, fuel, migration, pests, income, expenditure, debt, children's games and so on. This was particularly useful for this research in identifying an annual distribution of natural hazards and how these hazards can influence life and livelihoods including the traditional crop calendar of the local farmers of Bonna village.

It was also used to understand weather and climatic changes over the year, and identify problems, periods of stress and scarcity, and livelihood opportunities not only related to hazards but also other social issues such as access to local institutions and power structures.

When villagers were asked how they would draw a seasonal calendar indicating hazards over the year, they selected to draw the calendar on a large white sheet instead of drawing on the ground. They drew a graph consisting of two axes. They indicated the names of all months of a Bengali year along the horizontal x axis and the names of major hazards along the vertical y axis. Different colour pens were used to draw horizontal lines representing the relative length of the hazard events.

They also followed the same strategy to draw the other seasonal calendars. Timeline analysis identifies historical sequences of events, generally over a period of years or decades ibid. This technique can be used to discuss significant events and identify sequences of major changes and local coping strategies over time.

The important characteristic of this method is in providing reference points for trend or change analysis.