Compare methods

	Participatory Poverty Assessment	Participatory Rural Appraisal
Field	Development Studies	Anthropology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	1994
Originator	World Bank (Deepa Narayan; Caroline Robb); building on Robert Chambers's participatory tradition	Robert Chambers and collaborators
Type	Participatory qualitative poverty analysis method	Family of participatory field appraisal and planning methods
Seminal source	Narayan, D., Patel, R., Schafft, K., Rademacher, A., & Koch-Schulte, S. (2000). Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank. ISBN: 9780195216011	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.
Aliases	PPA, Participatory Poverty Study, Voices of the Poor Method, Participatory Poverty Diagnosis	PRA, Participatory Learning and Action, Participatory Rural Appraisal Methods, PLA
Related	4	2
Summary	A Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) is an instrument for understanding poverty from the perspective of poor people themselves, using participatory methods to elicit their own definitions, experiences, and priorities rather than imposing externally fixed indicators. Pioneered by the World Bank in the 1990s and made famous by the multi-country 'Voices of the Poor' study, the PPA combines participatory rural appraisal tools with a deliberate concern to influence policy, complementing rather than replacing the quantitative household surveys on which official poverty measurement rests.	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.