Introduction

PRA is a field information collection technique, in which field workers interact with local peoples aiming to facilitate local capacity to analyse, plan, resolve conflicts, monitor and evaluate, and take action according to a local agenda.

PRA is distinguished at its best by the use of local graphic representations created by the community that legitimize local knowledge and promote empowerment.

It is designed to facilitate interaction between the field workers and local peoples. In this process, field workers act as a facilitator in a process of collecting and sharing information to engage villagers in local planning and action. Villagers are empowered to analyse their own situation, and plan and take action according to their own agenda, rather than that of the field worker.

Dr. Robert Chamber is the founder of this approach, which emerges in the 1980s with proper builds on Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) but goes much further. To RRA it adds some more radical activist perspectives, deriving principally from South Asia. Its five central additional concepts are:

• Empowerment

 Knowledge is power. Knowledge arises from the process and results of the research that, through participation, come to be shared with and owned by local people. Thus the professional monopoly of information, used for planning and management decisions, is broken. New local confidence is generated, or reinforced, regarding the validity of their knowledge. “External” knowledge can be locally assimilated.

• Respect

The PRA process transforms the researchers into learners and listeners, respecting local intellectual and analytical capabilities. Researchers have to learn a new “style”. Researchers must avoid at all costs an attitude of patronizing surprise that local people are so clever they can make their own bar charts etc. A good rule of thumb is that when you can really understand the local jokes, poetry and songs, then you may feel you are starting to understand the people’s culture.

• Localization

The extensive and creative use of local materials and representations encourages visual sharing and avoids imposing external representational conventions.

• Enjoyment

PRA should be fun. The emphasis is no longer on “rapid” but on the process.

• Inclusiveness

Enhanced sensitivity, through attention to process; include marginal and vulnerable groups, women, children, aged, and destitute.