Rapid rural appraisal

Slovak term: Slovenský termín

1. Rapid rural appraisal (also known as participatory rural appraisal - PRA) is an approach aimed at incorporating the knowledge and opinions of rural people in the planning and management of development projects and programmes (WHO 2009)

Explanation

In 1983 Robert Chambers, a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies used the term Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) to describe techniques that could bring about a ’reversal of learning’ at a time when there was growing dissatisfaction among development experts with both the reductionism of formal surveys, and the biases of typical field visits. Two years later, the first international conference to share experiences relating to RRA was held in Thailand, and this was followed by a rapid growth in the development of methods that involved rural people in examining their own problems, setting their own goals, and monitoring their own achievements. By the mid 199O’s, the term RRA had been replaced by a number of other terms including ‘Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)’ and ‘Participatory Learning and Action’ (PLA). Hundreds of participatory techniques and tools have been described; they can be divided into four categories:

• Group dynamics, e.g. learning contracts, role reversals, feedback sessions
• Sampling, e.g. transect walks, wealth ranking, social mapping
• Interviewing, e.g. focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews, triangulation
• Visualization, e.g. Venn diagrams, matrix scoring, timelines

To ensure that people are not excluded from participation, these techniques avoid writing wherever possible, relying instead on the tools of oral communication (WHO 2009).

References

• WHO (2009) Health impact assessment glossary: E-learning modules

Links

• WHO — The Health and Environment Lexicon