Participatory poverty assessment
# Participatory poverty assessment

Participatory poverty assessment (PPA) is the approach to analyzing and reducing poverty by incorporating the views of the poor. PPAs attempt to better understand the poor, to give the poor more influence over decisions that affect their lives, and to increase effectiveness of poverty reduction $policies.^{:6}$ PPAs are seen as complements to traditional household surveys by helping to interpret survey results, and aim to capture the experiences of the poor by being more $open-ended.^{:xiii,xv}$

## History

Before the 1990s, household-survey approaches were the main way to measure poverty. This shifted to participatory activities in the 1990s after critiques of these traditional $methods.^{:1,3}$

The term "participatory poverty assessment" was coined within the World Bank in 1992, and was seen as a participatory form of poverty assessments (PAs, i.e. survey-based $approaches).^{:2,3}$

Early experiences of PPAs were in sub-Saharan Africa in the early $1990s.^{:3}$

By 1998, 43 PPAs had been conducted: 28 in Africa, 6 in Latin America, 5 in Eastern Europe, and 4 in $Asia.^{:xiii,xiv,15}$

Early PPAs focused most on making higher quality information available to policy makers, rather than seeing the poor as itself being involved in the process of reducing $poverty.^{:3}$

Later in the 1990s, "second generation" PPAs appeared, which tried to allow the poor to influence policy $decisions.^{:4}$

As of 2012, the World Bank's Voices of the Poor is the largest PPA ever to have been $conducted.^{:4}$

## Rationale and comparison to previous methods

Both PPAs and traditional surveys contain both quantitative and qualitative information, as well as "subjective" and "objective" parts, so this is not necessarily a distinguishing feature of $PPAs.^{:4}$ Rather:

   Traditional survey data can be used to count, compare, and predict. The strength of the PPA is not in counting but rather in understanding hidden dimensions of poverty and analyzing causality and processes by which people fall into and get out of $poverty.^{:5}$

PPAs are also distinguished from anthropological studies because the latter analyze few communities in depth, whereas PPAs analyze various communities of a country. PPAs also focus on policy decisions (which anthropological studies don't need $to).^{:5,6}$

## Types of methodologies and activities

Within PPAs, various methodologies exist. Some PPAs use more than one $methodology.^{:6}$

* Field work and conducting $interviews^{:5}$
* Rapid rural appraisal
* Participatory rural appraisal (includes use of visuals, such as matrices and diagramming)
* SARAR (self-esteem, associative strength, resourcefulness, action planning, and responsibility)
* Beneficiary assessment
* Semistructured interviews and focus groups

PPAs can last from several weeks to several $months.^{:7}$

## Organizations using this approach

Various organizations have used PPAs as part of their work.

* World Bank
* United Nations Development Programme $(UNDP)^{:3}$
* Department for International $Development^{:17}$
* ActionAid
* Asian Development Bank
* Danish International Development Agency
* Oxfam UK
* Thailand Development Research Institute

In addition, "secondary stakeholders" (i.e. organizations that do not conduct PPAs directly, but participate in PPAs) such as UNICEF, various NGOs (e.g. Save the Children and Oxfam), academic institutions, etc., have also participated in $PPAs.^{:5}$

## Results

Participatory poverty assessments confirmed the multidimensional nature of poverty (i.e. that the poor deal not just with lack of money, but with various problems like lack of resources, poor health, physical violence, social isolation, etc.) that was seen from traditional household questionnaire-based $methods.^{:vi}$ PPAs have also been able to access information that was not obtained in household surveys by building trust. For instance PPAs have obtained information on sensitive topics such as child prostitution, drug use, and domestic violence in relation to $poverty.^{:xiv}$

In Zambia, PPAs discovered that the timing of school fees caused economic stress for households, so new legislation to change this timing was $proposed.^{:xv}$

In Niger, a PPA found that the poor see education only as a seventh priority for poverty reduction due to "the concern that what children learn had little relevance to getting people out of poverty". As a result of this PPA, food security was $prioritized.^{:vii}$

PPAs have also informed World Bank's World Development $Reports.^{:vi}$

