Resources

After four years of implementing REFLECT in Uganda, this article examines some of the issues REFLECT participants have discussed including, children's education and the giving of food to relatives and friends after a good harvest. The impacts the approach has had are briefly outlined.

This book includes a wide ranging collection of papers which have been divided into sections dealing with communicating with children, gender empowerment, community interactive processes, approaches and insights, ethics and values of community participation and organizational capacity building.

This introductory chapter argues that many participatory development intiatives do not deal well with the complexity of community differences, including age, economic, religious, caste, ethnic and, in particular, gender. The fields of participatory development and gender have remained far apart, both in theory and practice, despite their shared goals of social inclusion and societal transformation. The chapter discusses how participatory development has come to pay so little attention to community differences, focusing on the problem of simplistic notions of community, participation and empowerment. It then describes how development organisations are slowly waking up to the importance of these issues. Finally, it summarises the collective insights from the contributors to the book "The Myth of Community".

This manual is for development professionals and residents of local communities in the North and the South who address constraints to equitable, effective and sustainable development. The authors hope that the framework for socio-economic and gender analysis offered will contribute to capacity building and empowerment of communities. The manual is divided into five sections - an overview, outline of conceptual framework, elaboration of participatory strategies and tools, sketching of scenarios and a concluding section on measuring effectiveness. Each section is detailed and a step by step guidance is offered to conduct the analysis.

'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 second book of the series draws material from a 23-country comparative study, which used open-ended participatory methods, bringing together the voices and realities of 20,000 poor women, men, youth and children. Despite very different political, social and economic contexts, there are striking similarities in poor people's experiences. The common underlying theme is one of powerlessness, which consists of multiple and interlocking dimensions of illbeing or poverty. The book starts by describing the origins of the study, the methodology and some of the challenges faced. This is followed by an exploration of the multidimensional nature of wellbeing and illbeing. Most of the book comprises the core findings - the 10 dimensions of powerlessness and illbeing that emerge from the study - and is organised around these themes. These include livelihoods and assets; the places where poor people live and work; the body and related to this, accessing health services; gender roles and gender relations within the household; social exclusion; insecurity and related fears and anxieties; the behaviour and character of institutions; and poor people's ratings of the most important institutions in their lives. These dimensions are brought together into a many-stranded web of powerlessness, which is compounded by the lack of capability, including lack of information, education, skills and confidence. The final chapter is a call to action and dwells on the challenge of change.

This dissertation focuses on the dynamics between PRA/participatory development and empowerment processes, particularly in the context of gendered relations of power. It starts with a critical discussion of existing literature around PRA, empowerment and gender, from which a theoretical framework is developed. It argues that PRA arenas are spaces of unusual social relations, where the participation of subordinated groups may be perceived as representing their 'empowerment', when in fact such observations are not necessarily indicative of people's 'empowerment' in the time-spaces in which their everyday lives are played out. Drawing on Foucault's notion of 'heterotopian spaces', it then explores whether people's participation in PRA events, their performance of unusual social relations in this constructed arena, can engender their own critical questioning and sustainable transformation of their everyday social relations in everyday time-spaces. Focussing on the particular approach to PRA practiced by the Society for People's Education and Economic Change (SPEECH) and their work within a situated community in Tamil Nadu, southern India, the author centers the analysis around the constructions and practices of gendered relations of power within different time-spaces, and the transformations engendered through the multiple dimensions of SPEECH's work with the community. In doing so, it examines the processes through which 'empowerment' might be re-performed and extended beyond PRA arenas into people's everyday lives.