Participatory poverty assessment 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. 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.
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. The term "participatory poverty assessment" was coined within the World Bank in 1992, and was seen as a participatory form of poverty assessments. Early experiences of PPAs were in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s. By 1998, 43 PPAs had been conducted: 28 in Africa, 6 in Latin America, 5 in Eastern Europe, and 4 in Asia. 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. Later in the 1990s, "second generation" PPAs appeared, which tried to allow the poor to influence policy decisions. As of 2012, the World Bank's Voices of the Poor is the largest PPA ever to have been conducted.
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. Rather: 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.
Types of methodologies and activities
Within PPAs, various methodologies exist. Some PPAs use more than one methodology.
In addition, "secondary stakeholders" such as UNICEF, various NGOs, academic institutions, etc., have also participated in PPAs.
Results
Participatory poverty assessments confirmed the multidimensional nature of poverty that was seen from traditional household questionnaire-based methods. 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. In Zambia, PPAs discovered that the timing of school fees caused economic stress for households, so new legislation to change this timing was proposed. 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. PPAs have also informed World Bank's World Development Reports.
