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The World Bank Participation Sourcebook
Appendix II: Working Paper Summaries

Participation in Poverty Assessments

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The Bank's approach to country poverty assessments (PAs) is increasingly to stress the involvement of stakeholder groups with the aim of building in-country capacity to address the problems of the poor.* The participation of government and other institutional stakeholders in all aspects of the work increases sensitivity to poverty issues, improves analytical skills, and builds allegiance to the measures proposed for poverty reduction. In addition, conventional statistical analysis is complemented by qualitative information from participatory PAs (PPAs), which reveal concerns voiced by the poor. Some early lessons for Task Managers have already emerged from this experience.

Rationale

PAs are now an essential component in the Bank's country economic and sector work, contributing to the wider process of poverty-related analysis and the formulation of all aspects of country strategy. Making PAs participatory requires more time and resources but can yield important benefits.

Involving a range of stakeholders, including the poor themselves, can help the following:

A distinction is made between "participation in PAs," the subject of this paper, and PPAs. The latter has come to refer to the use of specific qualitative research techniques to discern the perceptions and attitudes of the poor themselves. PPAs, however, are only one component of the wider PA. This paper argues that most components of the PA, from defining the agenda and designing the research program through data gathering and analysis to report writing and formulating policy prescriptions, can benefit from broad stakeholder participation.

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Making the PA More Participatory

The methods used to broaden stakeholder participation in PAs have varied enormously, depending on the time allowed, the funds available, the local research capacity, and the level of government interest in discussing poverty issues. It has also become clear since the initial flurry of PAs in 1993 that to increase participation Task Managers need somewhat more time and resources to complete PAs.

Involving Institutional Stakeholders

It is the institutional stakeholders, from senior government officials and a variety of actors in civil society to service providers and development workers at the community level, who are responsible for defining poverty reduction policies and for translating them into programs and services. The collaboration of these groups at each step of the PA helps to promote consensus, ownership, and commitment to the strategic conclusions among those whose support will be needed for effective implementation. It also helps to build the institutional capacity for ongoing, iterative policy analysis and formulation for poverty reduction.

So far, most institutional stakeholder involvement in Bank PAs has been limited to government officials and local researchers. Innovative approaches such as those used in Cameroon (see box A2.4), are needed to involve other actors, including opinion leaders, journalists, civic or religious leaders, public interest groups, and indigenous NGOs, in preparing the PA.

The scope for collaboration in defining the research agenda depends on political and institutional conditions in the country concerned. Especially in the early PAs, scope was also constrained by tight deadlines facing Task Managers for completing the work. Close consultation and agreement between the Bank and the government from the outset can reduce the risk of later misunderstandings and acrimony over politically sensitive issues, especially the controversial question of establishing a poverty profile and poverty line to serve as benchmarks against which progress can be measured.

Drawing as widely as possible on local skills and knowledge in the analytical work of the PA contributes to the quality of the conclusions. It also spreads the ownership base. Analytical studies and report writing have been contracted to local researchers and/or assigned to collaborative teams of Bank and local researchers. To broaden participation, Task Managers have also used workshops or retreats and established in-country task forces or steering committees.

Collaboration in formulating policy prescriptions can be more difficult; most Task Managers have faced the quandary of how best to reconcile the interests of senior officials and vocal stakeholders with the results of research and analysis. The most PPAs in this respect have been those for Peru (see box A2.5) and Morocco: in each case, (a) the PA was presented as supporting research and analysis to help the government in the policy formulation process, (b) the government took full responsibility for preparing the policy document, discussing successive drafts with Bank staff before final publication, and (c) the Bank has integrated the government's poverty strategy in the lending program of the country department as a whole.

Incorporating the PPA

The participation of the poor and other groups through PPAs can contribute to the overall PA by complementing, informing, or validating the results of more conventional analysis based on household survey data and government statistics. To date, PPAs have been designed specifically to do the following:

The participation of the poor has been elicited through various data gathering and consultative mechanisms. The main methodologies-beneficiary assessment and participatory rural appraisal-share many core techniques, including conversational and semistructured interviews, focus group interviews, and participant observation. Participatory rural appraisal (see Appendix I), which focuses on analysis at the community rather than household level, also uses thematic mapping, wealth and preference ranking, institutional diagramming, and other techniques by which participants generate their own analyses of key elements of their livelihoods.

The choice of methods has depended in practice on the particular experience of the Task Manager or supporting specialist, as well as on available resources and the role intended for the PPA within the overall PA. Achieving reasonable coverage for a national-scale beneficiary assessment to investigate a range of issues typically requires at least six to nine months work and a budget in the region of $50,000 to $100,000. Rapid appraisal, requiring less than one month of fieldwork, has been used in five of the seventeen countries in which PPAs have been undertaken.

Some early lessons have already emerged from this experience. In defining objectives of the PPA, the temptation exists to overload the agenda with a large number of questions important to the PA as a whole. Most Task Managers feel in retrospect that results of the PPA would have been richer if the research focus had been narrower. The PPA can provide an important new perspective on the issue of poverty, complementing but not substituting for quantitative data. The key challenge is to integrate the two approaches within the PA framework, appreciating the limitations of each.

Identifying and selecting field sites and participants (a representative sample of "the poor") is a critical issue for the PPA, especially when societies and the communities within them are highly stratified. This can be approached either through participatory methods, using local perceptions of key groups for analysis, or through sampling based on household survey results. Researchers need to be clear about which they are using as results may differ.

There are good reasons for selecting a broad range of people, from different technical and institutional backgrounds, for the PPA research teams. Including NGO and government staff as well as academics broadens ownership and enables the team to draw on wider institutional experience. The more diverse the backgrounds of team members, however, the more vital is a rigorous training input to generate a unified and coherent approach.

Another lesson learned on the early PPAs is that it is easy to underestimate the time and skills required for analysis and synthesis of qualitative research material. Task Managers should plan for some of the analysis to be carried out in the field and also allow for inputs from experienced social scientists (from within or outside the Bank).

Because the PPA is only one of the inputs influencing the recommendations of the PA, and because the PA document, in turn, is only one of the factors influencing actual policy change, it can be difficult to measure the policy impacts of specific PPAs. Nonetheless, policy relevance should be the guiding criterion in the design of methodology and process for the PPA. Evaluation by the country department of the impact of the Zambia PPA, as summarized in box A2.7, has found that the PPA strongly influenced both the conclusions of the PA, especially the action plan and national policy formulation.

Evaluation of the Zambian experience (the first national-scale PPA to be completed) also points to some measures that could have increased the value of the PPA in policy formulation: a stronger focus on the institutional mechanisms by which needs and problems could be resolved, completing the PPA earlier to allow for follow-up of the priority areas identified, and sharpening methods to investigate local perceptions on specific policy issues, such as food marketing.

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Broad Stakeholder Participation in Cameroon

Cameroon's PA was carried out with extensive Cameroonian participation and involved the National Statistical Office in preparing the poverty profile and the Centre for Nutrition Research in addressing food insecurity issues. The PPA was carried out by local NGOs and research institutes.

To share the research results and broaden participation in dialogue on the policy implications, a four-day technical workshop was sponsored by the government and the Bank with financial support from several key donors. Participants included representatives of donor agencies and some forty-five Cameroonians with interest in related research and civic or government activities from the government, university, research and advocacy groups, journalism, and NGOs. Women participants were funded by the United Nations Children's Fund. Despite the breadth of different interests represented. Some important areas of agreement emerged, including the potential benefits of decentralizing decisionmaking. By the end of four days, agreement was reached on the form the recommendations should take and considerable enthusiasm had been generated for the final report.

The workshop was followed by a one-day conference to provide wider exposure of the findings to both government and the general public. The immediate impact of this conference was to raise consciousness concerning poverty issues, generate widespread public interest and concern, and put poverty reduction higher on the public policy agenda.

(Box A2.4)

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Policy Formulation in Peru

In the Peru PA, the Bank team opted to hold back on defining a poverty alleviation strategy and wait until the government produced their own strategy. Two things that helped this approach to work were that (a) most of the survey analysis had been done in Peru, making it easier for Peruvians to incorporate the results into a policy document and (b) government officials were aware that presentation of their strategy for poverty alleviation would be key to an effective Consultative Group meeting, which was to be hosted by the Bank to raise funds for social programs. Bank staff worked closely with government staff on drafts of the strategy. The resulting government document is quite strong, setting specific goals in several areas, and should serve as a good base for measuring progress in reducing poverty in Peru.

(Box A2.5)

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PPA Highlights the Potential of Women's Groups in Kenya

The coping strategies of the poor (the vast majority of whom do not have access to credit) depend on diversifying their livelihoods and on the strength of their social networks and informal groups. Because their livelihoods are so diversified, no single employment program will reach the poor. The informal groups and associations, on the other hand, engage in a wide range of economic and social welfare activities. The PPA in Kenya highlighted the untapped potential of these groups to reach the poorer segments of society.

The PPA study estimated that at least 300,000 groups and associations exist in rural Kenya, including more than 23,000 registered women's groups. It found that every village had from five to seventeen different types of groups, and more than one active or defunct women's group. The following are some of the findings that emerged about these women's groups:

Based on the findings of the PPA, proposals to reach the poor by strengthening women's groups include legal registration so that groups are eligible for credit, technical and business management training of group members, and extension of microenterprise credit to groups.

(Box A2.6)

This note is based on the paper written by Andrew Norton and Thomas Stephens. Contributors include John Clark, Hugo Diaz, Anne Doize, Ann Duncan, Jorge Garcia-Mujica, John Innes, Evangeline Javier, Polly Jones, Steen Jorgensen, Gibwa Kajubi, Sarah Keener, Qaiser Khan, Adriana de Leva, Claire Lucas, Alexandre Marc, Branko Milanovic, Deepa Narayan, Miria Pigato, Nicholas Prescott, Lawrence Salmen, Lynne Sherburne-Benz, Roger Sullivan, Maurizia Tovo, and Mark Woodward.

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