Resources

This guide aims to enable activists, trainers and other involved in development and democracy to promote citizen participation and to democratize decision-making. Drawing on experiences of NGOs from numerous countries, the document contains concepts, tools and step-by-step processes aimed at promoting citizen advocacy. It aims to help activists, practitioners and planners to work with civil society in a way that promotes political change, develops solutions to development problems and policies, creates strong and lasting links and transforms power relations, including gender dynamics.

This article explores constraints encountered when using PRA on an ODA-funded natural resources project in a tribal area of Western India. It was particularly evident that women's participation in the PRAs was minimal. The reasons for this were practical (women were not available collectively for long periods of time & there were few women fieldworkers as the project had just begun), social (PRA activities tended to take place in public places where women felt awkward) and methodological (women respond to PRA activities in different ways, sometimes feeling bored and "communicating by singing instead"). The author argues that an organised PRA "gives privilege to certain kinds of knowledge and representation and suppresses others" : the emphasis given to formal knowledge and activities tends to "reinforce the invisibility of women's roles". However, once the formal and public nature of PRA is perceived as a problem, it can become a means by which "women's knowledge and activities.. can be transferred from the informal to the formal arena of project planning", thereby increasing women's profile. Suggestions for encouraging women's participation in PRA include: making non-public contexts (since women are more used to the "private sphere"), using women's knowledge and ways of communicating (songs, sayings, proverbs). There are constraints: the "production of observable outputs (maps, diagrams of PRA) have more status for fieldworkers" than scribbled songs or informal interview notes and women's expressed needs (eg a flour mill) "don't fit easily into established categories of natural resource development".

This article focuses on gender aspects of participatory projects. It draws on the author's own research as well as secondary sources and states that gender inequalities in resources, time, and power, influence the priorities and framework of participatory projects as much as "top-down" development and market activities. Increasing the numbers of women involved in participatory projects cannot, therefore, be seen as a soft alternative to specific attention to change in gender inequality. Meeting the demands of poor women in the South will require not only local participatory projects, but a linking with wider movements for change in the national and international development agenda.

"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 first book of the series gathers the voices of over 40,000 poor women and men in 50 countries from the World Bank's participatory poverty assessments. Using participatory and qualitative research methods, the study presents very directly, through poor people's own voices, the realities of their lives; these voices send powerful messages that point the way toward policy change. The book explores the common patterns that emerged from poor people's experiences in many different places. It starts by presenting the conceptual framework, elaborating on participatory poverty assessments and the study's methodology, including its limitations. It then articulates definitions of poverty from the perspective of the poor, stressing its multi-dimensionality. State institutions and civil society institutions are assessed critically, with their impact on reaching the poor deemed ineffective and limited respectively, forcing the poor to depend primarily on informal networks. Gender relations in the household are then analysed, as is how these affect and are affected by larger institutions of society. The issue of social fragmentation is also explored, including a discussion of social cohesion and social exclusion. The book concludes by proposing the way forward, while elaborating the elements of a strategy for change.

This case study describes how the membership federation of the Democratic Socialist Women of the Philippines (DSWP) has used advocacy to organise and advance the interests of grassrootsÆ women within the political arena. The advocacy experiences in this story range from local level denouncements in cases of domestic violence, to legislative reform, and to electoral organisation establishing a womenÆs political party and field women candidates for the Party List Law in 1998. The study is primarily a description of how a national federation mobilises its membership to advocate at different levels. The experience from DSWP provides lessons about organising the power of numbers and responds to a number of questions: how grassroots members are incorporated into and ultimately drive the advocacy agenda; how decisions are made at the community level and in the organisation so that the process is empowering and owned by the members; and how women and other disadvantaged groups have created alternative forms of political strategy and organisation in order to engage in politics and at the same time, transform political culture. The study was an initiative of the Asia FoundationÆs Global Women in Politics Program (GWIP) supported by USAID (United States Agency for International Development).advocacy, influence, Philippines, domestic violence, women, gender, legislation, election

This toolkit draws on the lessons generated from learning projects and case studies supported under the Citizens and Governance programme of the Commonwealth Foundation. It offers practical guidance on how to promote the participation of citizens in governance. The contents of the toolkit include: the meaning of inclusive governance; ways for citizens to organise and engage in governance; strategies for multi-sectoral partnerships; key themes that emerge in governance, such as conflict, gender and power; suggestions for participatory methods in governance, including learning circles, popular theatre and role play; and methods for inclusive governance capacity building of citizens, intermediaries and government officials. Brief summaries of action-learning projects and case studies from the Citizens and Governance Programme from: India, the Caribbean, Vanuatu, Tanzania, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Jamaica, Zimbabwe, UK, New Zeeland, Africa, Malaysia, Canada and Belize; are presented. A toolkit CD-ROM designed to run on Windows 95/98/XP and MacOS9 is also incorporated. The CD-ROM contains the toolkit in an electronic format and has a resource bank of downloadable materials, such as relevant publications, materials used by the project partners and a word bank which provides explanations of, and proverbs illustrating terms common in the debate about civil society and governance which project partners themselves have furnished.