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Skills and Tools
Strengthening this facilitating role of NGOs in the participatory community assessment process was a key emphasis of the Alliance’s skill development work. Training workshops in Sri Lanka and Cambodia, which prepared NGOs for their assessments, discussed and rehearsed facilitation skills, such as active listening, open questioning, and maximising group participation. In Cambodia, KHANA encouraged each NGO to set itself a team contract, which would stipulate key aspects of its participatory approach, and against which each NGO could assess its own performance. These contracts proved to be a valuable reminder of the participatory attitudes and skills discussed during the workshop and helped to reinforce the whole staff’s commitment to implement them during the assessment.
Team Contract for Working with Community
Kasekor Thmey, an NGO working in Kampong Cham province in Cambodia, drew up the following team contract for conducting its assessment:
1. Introduce each other to the community.
2. Explain the purpose of the assessment.
3. Facilitate the assessment process.
4. Don’t interrupt people while they are talking.
5. Be friendly with people.
6. Allow opportunities for people to fully express themselves.
7. Listen actively to people while they are speaking.
8. Encourage people and thank them.
The Alliance has also focused on adapting and refining a set of assessment tools which promote community participation. The principal method used in Bangladesh, the first country to conduct community assessments, was the semi-structured interview. Careful pre-testing of the questionnaire ensured a degree of community contribution to the decisions on the range and types of questions to be asked.
However, the limitations to community participation implied by the interview format became evident in these early assessments. Such a format tended to fix the roles of the NGO and community members as “providers” of information, thus reinforcing rather than challenging the separation and power imbalance between the two. The use of tape recorders and/or individual staff to take notes emphasised this imbalance (literally, in some cases, by outnumbering the interviewees.) The emphasis on recording information and then taking it away to be analysed and returned to the community as a set of conclusions also risked undermining the partnership between communities and NGOs in the assessment process and did not draw on the community’s own ability to analyse and make sense of their own experience.
For these reasons, the Alliance adapted and refined other tools – and frameworks in which to use them - which more consciously promote community participation in the assessment process. Drawn from community development work, many of these tools were initially developed for and identified with Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA).
Why PRA?
“PRA methodologies build on existing knowledge within the community, and then use that information to identify needs and solutions. In this sense, PRA is more responsive and flexible to both immediate and changing needs. In collecting information, PRA methodologies do not focus on absolutes, but rather assess approximates. This is particularly useful in sexual health, given the fact that often there are no “right” answers and many different experiences to take into account. Often, PRA will force the development worker to go beyond their assumptions and see things from the community’s perspective.
The principles underlying PRA include: openness; assessing the reality of the situation; accepting that as development workers, we do not know nor do we have to know everything; respecting diversity within communities; identifying specific solutions from information generalised by specific communities; and assisting in the collection of data, but giving up ownership of the process and the information to the community.”
(Reference: Report on “Visit to Sri Lanka, 12-21 1997: Report on a PRA Workshop for Sexual Health Needs Assessment“, International HIV/AIDS).
The different techniques and tools which comprise PRA and which have been used by the Alliance in assessment work will be discussed in more detail in the next section, which looks at assessment of vulnerability to HIV. This section will concentrate on the ways in which PRA tools have enhanced community participation in the assessment process.
PRA’s emphasis on drawing and diagramming has proved to be effective in stimulating discussion of what can often be sensitive issues around sexual health. In part, this is because the drawings and diagrams themselves become the focus of discussion rather than group members’ own personal experiences, knowledge or views. NGOs in Cambodia worked with small groups of community members (divided by gender and marital status) to develop ‘typical person vulnerability profiles’ and found that this enabled group members to discuss issues of vulnerability to HIV in relation to people ‘like them’, without having to discuss their own experience of vulnerability and HIV-related risk behaviour.
The Alliance has also found that the process of creating diagrams and drawings can promote the sharing of community knowledge and expertise, rather than its extraction. The drawings and diagrams also provide a continuing, and accessible, record of community discussions which remain within the community and have been used by community members to educate others about the assessment process.
PRA methods have also provided structured ways for the community to assess the specific contexts in which HIV transmission takes place. Tools have been used to explore situational risks and resources, trends over time, causal relationships, differentiation by age, gender and wealth, and to rank problems and responses. In this way, PRA tools help not only to elicit information but can also be used to facilitate its analysis by and with the community.
The accessibility and ready applicability of PRA tools were appreciated by NGO staff. During a closing evaluation of a training, one NGO staff member said that “she had been going to workshops since 1993, but this was the first time she had been given something she could take straight back to use with her community to their benefit.”
Community members also responded well to the PRA tools, in spite of some initial reluctance to draw and diagram, for fear that their work would not be good enough.