Compare methods

	Social Audit	Participatory Poverty Assessment
Field	Development Studies	Development Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	2000
Originator	Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), Rajasthan, India; institutionalised in India's MGNREGA	World Bank (Deepa Narayan; Caroline Robb); building on Robert Chambers's participatory tradition
Type	Public accountability and verification method	Participatory qualitative poverty analysis method
Seminal source	Centre for Good Governance (2005). Social Audit: A Toolkit - A Guide for Performance Improvement and Outcome Measurement. Hyderabad: Centre for Good Governance.	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
Aliases	Social Audit, Public Social Audit, Jan Sunwai, Community Social Audit	PPA, Participatory Poverty Study, Voices of the Poor Method, Participatory Poverty Diagnosis
Related	4	4
Summary	A Social Audit is a method of public accountability in which citizens collectively examine official records of public spending and works and verify them against physical reality, culminating in an open public hearing where discrepancies are confronted in front of officials. Forged by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) in Rajasthan, India, in the 1990s and later embedded in law through India's national employment guarantee programme (MGNREGA), the social audit turns the right to information into a tool for exposing corruption and securing redress.	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.