Management Input - Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)

Continued from last issue….

PRA Tools Maps and Diagrams

In this final issue, we shall discuss key tools for extracting data regarding the identification and needs-assessment of people with disabilities in any community. Maps and diagrams are two of the most effective tools for communication between external people and the non-literate community members.

1. Social Maps:

This includes a bird's view of an entire village or a portion of an urban slum community, usually drawn on the floor/ground by the local community members themselves. Once the exercise is complete, the image looks like an aerial photograph taken from a helicopter, right above the village or the slum.

These social maps are the foundation for making any PRA Map based on which we could collect demographic data of the entire village/ urban slums. In fact, this is the very first activity in PRA wherein the local community is facilitated to use its indigenous knowledge. The process involves a wide participation from the community and a step-by-step inclusion of small details. A large group of local community members usually come together, and upon request from the external PRA team, they start the process of mapping by first drawing the access road to the village. Then they draw the internal roads of the village with houses marked on each side of the road or roads. Major land marks such as schools, temples, water resources, community halls, etc., are highlighted using different colours. Enthusiastic village children take great interest in the process of creating a map and sometimes use various materials to make it a 3-dimensional image.

Once the entire social map is drawn, house-listing activity starts. A group of youngsters starts identifying the houses from one end of the village to the other, and they list out the number of people living in each house, specifying the number of females, elderly people and children. Usually, we use different corns to indicate gender and age. This, however, is a time consuming activity, but it's something that is vitally important. By completing the house-list, we know the exact number of people living in the village with a gender disaggregated data.

It is at this point of time, we request the villagers to list all the names and details of persons with disabilities as per their knowledge. They usually list out the obvious disabilities and miss out those with intellectual and multiple disabilities. As such, they may need to be explained on the other and less obvious types of disabilities. Now, they are ready to recognize all the disabled people in their community.

The process of identifying each disabled person start from the first house with the community members specifying the nature of disability, as per the explanation given to them. It is important to request them to invite the identified disabled people to the venue - where the Social map is being prepared - to ascertain and cross check their condition. Flagging all houses having disabled people and preparing a separate list with details of their name, age, sex, type of disability, level of participation, brief needs assessments etc., is another important part of the entire mapping process. A Social Map serves as an effective tool to involve the community and at the same time collect demographic data to identify disabled people.

2. Resource Mapping

This map is prepared to list of all available resources for empowering disabled people within the community and in the neighbourhood. 

Draw 3 big circles A, B, C with A bigger than B and B bigger than C. Circle A is for listing resources within the village or within a cluster of villages. Circle B is for listing resources at the block level and circle C for resources in the District level or any major city or town nearby.  Request the community members to list resources like schools, colleges, banks, training centres, revenue offices, post offices, health centres, major hospitals, police stations, names and addresses of local artisans and craftsmen, NGOs and disability organisations, etc. Ideally, they should be able to list all the resources available for all the three circles in an hour's time.  This provides an interesting and a more involving way of collecting information as opposed to the traditional Survey method, which may take a month to do so.

3. Matrix ranking

We use this tool to identify the available trades in the community and in the neighbourhood. We need not invent and bring a new trade to the village; what's working for others, will work for the disabled people as well.

Take a huge drawing sheet and draw two straight horizontal and vertical lines. Mark the horizontal line as x-axis and the vertical line as Y-axis. It may be useful to mark both the lines with dots that are equally spaced. At the top left hand corner of the sheet, make sure to leave a margin to write headings. Now list all the available trades in the community such as agriculture, horticulture, dairy, petty shop, daily-wage labour, poultry, tailoring, etc. as headings for columns on the x-axis. List all the possible indicators such as the most practiced, most profitable, less risky, low investment, quick returns, most dependable trade, etc., on the Y-axis. You may use the dots on the lines to indicate these headings/indicators.

It is important to note that usually there is a debate when listing the indicators. Some members differ in their opinion from the rest. As such it is a good practice to rank the indicators based on their debate on each trade. The ranks can given based on marks given by the villagers out of 100, for each trade. This provides a good picture.  After having listed the trades and their indicators, ask the villagers whether disabled people can practice these trades. Their answer can measure the prevailing attitudes of the community towards disability. Listen to their answers carefully. Then motivate them to list out the trades that can possibly include people with disability. Ask them to do this by ticking against the trade written in the sheet; encourage them to ask you if they cannot remember what the headings stood for. Also, remind them to think of the nature of disabilities while making their comments or putting their ticks.

This tool provides two major outcomes - identification of trades and assessing attitudes on disabled people by the community. This makes for a very interesting activity as the villagers will be debating a lot before ranking each trade / indicator. Encourage them to justify why their rankings/ markings. 

4. Venn Diagrams or Chapatti diagrams:

This tool is to level-off functional efficacy of people serving in the village and also to measure the usefulness of service providers such as school teachers, health workers, Anganwadi workers, village heads, priests, etc. Outcomes of this tool are very useful for planning and developing the nature of programmes in the cluster of villages.

Draw two concentric circles with a clearly marked centre.  The inner circle indicates the value service providers within the village community and the outer circle indicates the efficacy of institutions such as hospitals, educational institutions, bank etc., at the district or city level. It is vitally important that we explain the context of the exercise and why it is important. Request them to give a value of a schoolteacher by the children in the village. They would prefer to put x paise of a rupee to value the service, for e.g., to rate a good teacher, they might put 80 paise. We should request them to keep this value at a particular distance from the centre, which signifies how close or further the teacher is from children. They would rate both the value and his/her attitudes. Some Venn diagrams also include picture so of animals to signify their behaviour. However, this is debatable whether to use such tools. Similarly, they would complete valuation of all the institutions at the block or district level. This is again an important tool for planning the programme.

5. Seasonality Calendars

These are calendars to mark lean season and the busy season for villagers. For example, the rainy and the harvest seasons are the busy seasons in the village. Similarly, we could also plot the customs/ rituals followed in the village such as festivals, marriages etc. This can provide a very strategic tool to help plan our interventions better in a way that our work will not disturb the usual village life. 

Dawn to dusk calendar: What happens in a day could also be plotted using the same calendar. We could make a fair assessment of how busy and hard working the women are in village by simply noting down what they do in a day.

6. Time Lines

Time-line charts are used to measure the developmental milestones of a village. Senior people on this chart mark major events. They would, for example, mention things such as when the first 10 families came to this the village, when the water supply was installed, when the first bus came to the village, when a famine occurred, etc.  These events, based on the information provided by the community are plotted on a time line with an interval of 10 years. This chart is very useful as we are able to see the pace of development in the community and prevailing attitudes towards disabilities, say over 50 years. It is also a wonderful too to gauze whether or not the community has changed its attitudes towards disabilities over a period of time. 

All these tools and use of appropriate processes of PRA makes PRA a fun and an involving method of approaching a community in your programme. It is an effective tool to make your programme effective and useful to all stakeholders.

There are specific courses available at PRAXIS, if you want to learn more about PRA. PRAXIS is an institution meant for promoting PRA in development Log on to www.praxisindia.org or write to the author for more information.

Author: K R Rajendra
Supported by: Barkha Henry