Resources

This paper, based on a lecture given at the University of Sussex, UK, takes on the issue of growing inequality. Arguing that we know more about how economic inequality affects political participation than we do about how participation and voice affect economic inequality, the author describes ongoing work to identify participatory practices that offer some precedents for linking strategies for narrowing political and economic gaps from below. These combinations in turn contribute to challenging these intersecting inequalities and hold promise for transformative solutions across the global North and South.

Time to Listen: A Discussion Guide was developed to stimulate discussion and reflection among practitioners working in international, national and local aid organizations, governments and donors. For those already familiar with Time to Listen, this guide serves as a useful review and as a means to introduce colleagues and partners to the voices and ideas presented in the book on how to improve the effectiveness of international aid efforts. For readers with no prior exposure to the Listening Project or Time to Listen, the Discussion Guide aims to spark an interest in and a desire to further explore the findings of the Listening Project and the implications for their work.

The format of the guide closely follows the structure of Time to Listen, briefly summarizing each chapter and presenting the reader with a series of thought-provoking discussion questions. These questions are intentionally open-ended, allowing users to tailor the discussion to fit their organizational needs. For practitioners, the questions can be used to encourage reflection on their personal approaches and practices. Supervisors can use the questions to encourage reflection and inspire changes among their team members. The questions can also be used in a class setting, allowing educators and students to discuss the implications for future policies and practices.

With roots in approaches to popular education and participatory action research that place the learner and the ‘beneficiary’ of development at the centre of enquiry and action, the participatory visualisation methods associated with Participatory Rural Appraisal have been widely used as tools for learning and accountability. In this article, the author reflects on lessons learnt from using these methods in a participatory process evaluation of an educational programme aimed at addressing chronic malnutrition in an East African country. Building on this experience, she explores the educative and empowering dimensions of participatory visualisation methods, and considers the contribution that these methods can make to effective evaluation.

Despite many initiatives to assure food access, and growing economies, high levels of undernutrition persist in much of Asia.  In this Working Paper Robert Chambers and Gregor von Medeazza explore the increasing evidence that this is due to the continuing high incidence open defecation (OD), combined with population density, which has mulitiple debilitating outcomes.  With the focus on diarrhoea-related ill health, there has been a relative neglect of other often subclinical and continuously debilitating faecally-transmitted infections (FTIs) including environmental enteropathy (EE), other intestinal infections, and parasites. The authors show how institutional, psychological and professional factors interact to perpetuate a blind spot to understanding that OD affects health in many different ways and is a key factor in tackling undernutrition.

This document, jointly authored by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and Participatory Development Associates (PDA), lays out the design of the impact evaluation of the Root & Tuber Improvement and Marketing Program (RTIMP) in Ghana.  Aiming at improving rural poor people’s livelihoods in Ghana through the development of commodity chains for Roots and Tubers (R&T) supplied by smallholders, the RTIMP consisted of three main areas of work: a) linking of smallholders to old and new markets; b) enhancing smallholder R&T production; and c) enhancing smallholder R&T processing.

The content of this design paper is as follows. The first section briefly describes the impact evaluation approach called PIALA. The second section presents the RTIMP Theory of Change (ToC). The third section continues with the Data Collection Matrix (DCM) laying out the assumptions, evaluation questions and methods. The fourth section presents the multi-stage sampling strategy. The fifth section provided an overview of the methods used to inquire the various populations at different levels. The sixth section outlines the approach taken for data collation, quality monitoring, contribution analysis and rating. Finally, the last section shows the timeline for the evaluation. A bibliography, list of references and annexes are added at the end. The annexes include the desk review note, the sampling frame and procedure, the field research schedule, the district data collation table, and finally, the approved budget.

The Paper was primarily sponsored by IFAD, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (Government of Ghana).

This paper explores how outcome measurement is understood in several SDC local governance programmes, reviewed in a HELVETAS Learning Project. This critical review assesses the extent to which power issues are recognised, understood and tracked within such programmes and suggests ways to enhance this.  This includes being clear about what power and empowerment mean in a particular context, how the way power is implicitly understood in local government programmes can lead to a focus only the more formal and visible dimensions of power, and how the complexity of power means that a more clearly articulated and power-aware theory of change underpinning the intervention is needed.