3. DATA REQUIREMENTS FOR POVERTY
2.8 Participatory approaches to poverty measurement Participatory appraisals
Participatory poverty assessments (PPA), such as those used in the World Bank, evolved from participatory rural appraisal (PRA) defined as “a growing family of approaches and methods to enable local people to share, enhance, and analyse their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to act.” (Chambers 1994).
Rapid appraisal and participatory appraisal are commonly used ap- proaches in monitoring poverty and the participatory design of projects.
Participatory appraisal has the specific objective of empowering the target group, while rapid appraisal methods are meant to provide evalu- ators data on the community in a very short time (usually a day visit) with a usually predetermined agenda (Zeller et al. 2001). They use simi-
lar methods. (See Appendix F for a list of methods). They are useful in identifying vulnerable groups in a community and, therefore, suited for targeting, as well as the participatory design of development projects and services.
Participatory wealth ranking
Participatory wealth ranking, a method used by both these approaches, asserts the primacy of local knowledge over externally determined mea- surement criteria. The ranking is based on the subjective view of the people in a community, who generate their own criteria with which to rank poverty or wealth. The ranking involves several stages: mapping, which takes place at a community meeting, where a village map is drawn and a list of households are generated from the map; initial ranking of household;113 and analysis114 (Falkingham and Namazie 2002).
2.8.1 Choice of indicator
The participatory approach uses local knowledge in the choice of indi- cator, and thus has a unique contribution to poverty measurement.
Chambers’ 1997 list of indicators from participatory assessments shows the importance of lacking assets, education, labour, and food security.
These were typically important indicators.
The largest PPA conducted by the World Bank is Voices of the Poor which included 69,000 people and 78 PPAs in more than 47 countries (Narayan et al. 2000). Voices of the poor concluded that the poor define poverty as multi-dimensional and beyond material well-being (Sumner 2003). (1) Risk and vulnerability and (2) empowerment and participa- tion were two aspects of well-being highlighted both in this study and the conjoint World Development Report 2000/2001. The study also identified food security and employment as important aspects of mate- rial well-being.
113 Each household is represented by a card. Three reference groups are set up for each section of the village that has been mapped, with three to five members of the community in each group.
Each group meets separately and sorts the household cards according to wealth on a continuum from high to low.
114 The results of the ranking of different groups are brought together and the piles are scored.
The final score of each household is the average of the ranks it was given by three reference groups
The advantage of the participatory approach is that it can be used to identify location-specific poverty indicators and indicators of depriva- tion.
2.8.2 Choice of unit of analysis
The unit of analysis is typically the household (see section on Participa- tory Wealth Ranking above).
2.8.3 Choice of poverty line
Poverty thresholds are implicit in this approach, which does not con- struct well-defined poverty lines, but rather asks for participatory wealth ranking, which fits in more with a completely relative notion of pov- erty.
2.8.4 Choice of poverty measure
Aggregation of information on individuals in poverty into a measure is not addressed in the participatory approach. Baulch (1996b) characterises participatory approaches as being strong on identification, but weak on aggregation. This may be too simplistic an assessment.
Chung et al. (1997) list several reasons why the usefulness of these methods in assessing poverty for regional, national or international com- parisons is limited. (1) The results stem from subjective ratings of com- munity members and are difficult to verify (2) the method is consistent with finding the poorest third in one village, but it may not be consis- tent in finding in which communities the poorest third of an entire region reside (3) strategic responses or biases in anticipation of benefits from understating wealth, cannot be ruled out (4) the method requires skilful and experienced communicators, in comparison with structured surveys that only require enumerators.
On the one hand, identification of the poorest takes place at a micro (village) level, and does not provide a means of consistent comparison
across villages. On the other hand, methods are being devised that al- low the application of these results beyond the village level. These are discussed below.
Participatory approaches can be extrapolated to other communi- ties, as for example in Ravnborg (1999), where a well-being index is created and extrapolated by means of a questionnaire applied to a ran- dom sample of communities. The similarity with proxy means testing is evident: but rather than key variables being identified by multivari- ate regression, they are identified by local informants (Davis and Siano 2001). Leclerc et al. (2000) extrapolate their results to the whole coun- try using neural nets and proxy indicators found in census data.
Christiaensen et al. (2000) were able to test if participatory wealth ranking and village mapping compared well with the more traditional household survey methodology by using both methods in a study of five villages in Northern Mali. They found that a sampling frame con- structed from a population census and revised with local input suffered from undercoverage, while village mapping suffered from overcoverage.
PWR resulted in higher estimates of household size and lower esti- mates of household wealth than the household survey. They interpret this to be the result of the dynamics of these different activities. They argue that rather than asserting the superiority of one method over another, it is important to carefully examine and acknowledge the bi- ases that can result from a particular method being used. They reiterate the importance of triangulating, or cross-checking, information that is obtained.
In another comparison in Kenya, the findings of the 1995 participa- tory survey using “wealth ranking” were compared with those of a 1992 National Welfare Monitoring Survey based on an established pov- erty line. Where cluster sampling was carefully carried out and where drought did not seriously affect the district in the intervening years, the estimates of poverty from the participatory survey were virtually
identical to those from the national survey (Narayan and Nyamwaya 1996 cited in Kanbur and Squire 2001).
Another apparent “inconsistency” between qualitative and quanti- tative results is that households that are clearly below the poverty line in monetary terms may not consider themselves poor in a wealth rank- ing/participatory/subjective approach. The reason for this is usually that “perceptions” of poverty have a strong relative component. People
“feel” poor relative to their neighbourhood (Thorbecke 2003).
Other criticisms of the approach are, that while communities are heterogeneous, the “voices” that are heard are likely to be those of the powerful. The public nature of the assessments may make it difficult to get honest assessments, and involve participants in some risk.
2.9 Other approaches to poverty measurement