Compare methods

	Community Scorecard	Participatory Rural Appraisal
Field	Development Studies	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2002	1994
Originator	CARE Malawi (developed within the social accountability movement); disseminated by the World Bank	Robert Chambers and collaborators
Type	Community-based social accountability monitoring tool	Family of participatory field appraisal and planning methods
Seminal source	CARE (2013). The Community Score Card (CSC): A Generic Guide for Implementing CARE's CSC Process to Improve Quality of Services. Atlanta: CARE.	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.
Aliases	CSC, Community Score Card, Community-Based Scorecard, Community Performance Scorecard	PRA, Participatory Learning and Action, Participatory Rural Appraisal Methods, PLA
Related	4	2
Summary	The Community Scorecard (CSC) is a participatory social-accountability tool for community-based monitoring of public services, in which both the users and the providers of a service rate its performance and then meet face to face to agree improvements. Developed by CARE in Malawi in the early 2000s and widely disseminated by the World Bank, it operates at the local facility level — a clinic, school, or water point — and is qualitative and dialogue-driven, generating immediate, actionable feedback rather than statistically representative ratings.	Participatory rural appraisal is a growing family of approaches and methods that enable local people to share, enhance, and analyze their own knowledge of their lives and conditions, and to plan and act on it. Associated above all with Robert Chambers, PRA reverses the conventional research relationship: outside facilitators hand over the stick, and community members themselves do the mapping, ranking, diagramming, and analysis that drive planning and action.