Standardization of PRA at the Planning Stage of Development Projects

—to Start Dialogue with People who Dislike Gender Issues—

Abstract

Promoting Gender Equality in the development field has been lead by gender specialists. The involvement to this field by the government of Japan, however, has been behind other donor countries. There are some reasons including the historical and ideological background that may affect the Japanese perception toward gender issue and Feminism. Another point to influence Japanese less-involvement is lack of common methods between gender specialists and non-gender specialists to see gender issues in the development projects. Though they may have less chance to have dialogue with each other, non-gender specialists, especially specialists concerning with participatory development cannot take gender issues away from their concern because ‘people's participatry’ means ‘participatry of men and women, both genders. In order to get involved into the issues, common methods to be shared are strongly required for both gender-and, non-gender specialists. Therefore, standardization of PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) at the planning stage of participatory development projects can be bridging common methods between them in the field. Standardization is usually regarded as a dangerous trial, and may be a foolish matter by people who really understand the variety of countries, regions, villages and families. However, as long as we do not have such common methods, gender issue would still be tackled by only gender specialists. We need common methods that can be used by even non-gender specialists to analyze gender issue. PRA could be able to become the one of the methods.

In introduction, the importance of practical methods to start dialogue between gender-and non-gender specialists is argued. In section 1, participatory development and PRA are discussed as the basis to share gender issues. Section 2 explains the example of conducting PRA at J province in Indonesia. Then, the focus turns to creating activity chart for the concerning project to be more participated by people, who are men and women. Concidering partricipatry means considering gender issues, and standardization on PRA and using the activity chart can get non-gender specialists involved into integrating gender into their fields.