Handbook on Participatory Methods for …

1 Handbook on Participatory Methods for Community-Based Projects: A Guide for Programmers and Implementers Based on the Participatory Action Research Project with Young Mothers and their Children in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Northern Uganda by Grace Onyango and Miranda Worthen Please visit for additional material about the PAR Project. Published November 2010. This publication may be reproduced for educational or non-profit purposes without permission, providing acknowledgement of the source is made. We would like to acknowledge our partner agencies, academics, and donors in the PAR Project.

2 In Liberia partners are Save the Children, UK, Touching Humanity in Need of Kindness, and Debey Sayndee at the University of Liberia; in Sierra Leone partners are Christian Brothers, Christian Children's Fund, Council of Churches in Sierra Leone, National Network for Psychosocial Care, and Samuel Beresford Weekes at Fourah Bay College; in Uganda partners are Caritas, Concerned Parents Association, Transcultural Psychosocial Organization, World Vision, and Stella Nema at Makerere University. Without the dedication of these partners, the PAR Project would have been impossible.

3 Our donors were the Oak Foundation, Pro Victimis Foundation, Compton Foundation, and UNICEF West Africa. We also wish to acknowledge the remarkable young mothers who participated in this study, who are too numerous to be thanked individually. Note to the Reader This Handbook has been designed to help you learn ways to integrate more Participatory Methods into programming for vulnerable populations, espe- cially war affected young adults and children. Throughout the Handbook , we talk about the Participatory Action Research (PAR) Project with Young Moth- ers and their Children.

4 The PAR Project took place in Liberia, Sierra Leone and northern Uganda and was implemented through an academic-NGO partnership that brought together a team of ten non-governmental organizations, three in-country academics and four Western academics. The project began in Octo- ber 2006 and ended in June 2009. Each of the ten NGO partners implemented the program in two field sites. A total of 658 young women, 80% of whom were between 16-24 years of age, together with more than 1,200 of their children participated in the project in the three countries.

5 Although the project was de- signed to promote the reintegration of young mothers formerly associated with armed forces, in order to prevent excessive targeting of this population, other vulnerable young mothers who had not been associated with armed groups were also included. You can learn more about the PAR Project and its find- ings in a report titled, Community-Based Reintegration of War-Affected Young Mothers: Participatory Action Research (PAR) in Liberia, Sierra Leone & Northern Uganda, which is available online at Throughout this Handbook , we hope to highlight the diversity of approaches that partner agencies took towards integrating Participatory Methods into their work.

6 While all the collaborators in the PAR Project agreed on certain values and approaches that we would all draw upon, we also strove to let a thousand flowers bloom, recognizing that in each context, the project would be shaped by its participants and thus the PAR Project would not look the same in any two communities. In this Handbook , we offer stories from the PAR Project as examples, but hope that you, the reader, will see the creativity in the Methods and develop your own approaches to increasing community participation in your program- ming or to beginning a new project with Participatory Methods at its core.

7 Introduction Participation is a word that has been used in child protection and develop- ment circles for many years. The term has come to mean everything from a to- ken consultation with a beneficiary group to full-scale participation by affected -1- communities in program development, implementation, and evaluation. In this Handbook , we will be describing Methods at this further end of the spectrum . that is, highly Participatory approaches. Participatory Action Research (PAR) is one type of Participatory methodology that is designed not only to achieve social change for a group or in a commu- nity, but also to document and learn from that process through research.

8 PAR. actively involves the target participants in a process to improve their situations. Participants become the program designers and researchers as they identify and implement solutions to the obstacles to achieving full participation in their community. Participants are key actors as evaluators of the project, reflecting on how well the process has helped them reach their stated goals. This process whereby participants engage in self-reflective inquiry into their own situations, identify problems and possible solutions, implement the solu- tions, and evaluate the project is an iterative one as new problems or obsta- cles are recognized, approaches to addressing the problems are developed and implemented.

9 Unlike traditional program design that is agency-centric where a problem is identified, then a program is implemented, and after implementa- tion, the program is evaluated, PAR offers multiple opportunities to develop and build upon what is learned throughout the process of implementation with the participants taking center stage. A critical difference between the PAR Project and more traditional agency programming is that the young mother participants themselves identified and prioritized their problems and came up with creative solutions to try to alter their situations.

10 In each of the 20 communities, problems included stigma from the community and family, inability to access health and education resources for themselves and their children, and inability to find sustainable livelihoods. While it is beyond the scope of this Handbook to describe all of the social ac- tions that participants engaged in, a more detailed description can be found in the report of the project, available at the website above. The Handbook explains how to use highly Participatory approaches, like the techniques used in the PAR Project, in community-based projects for vulner- able youth and children.