Sustainability Planning and Monitoring

PARTICIPATORY TOOLS USED IN THE MPA6.5 Pocket voting 23 Pocket voting exercises in Africa and East AsiaPurposeThis technique detects patterns and changes inbehavior and decision making by differentcategories of users and at different points of time,e.g., before/after interventions, during dry/rainyseasons etc. It is a particularly handy techniquefor sensitive subjects on which women, men or bothare inhibited about stating their views publicly. Thevoting is done in the four community focus groups,men/women, rich/poor. It is used during thecommunity assessment as well as the stakeholders’meeting.ProcessExample 1 - Use of water sourcesOn the back of a cloth stretched between two poles,trees or on a wall, the team member assisting thefocus group fixes small drawings in a matrix form.The drawings characterize the range of local watersources in the community and their possible uses.Drawings of water sources are placed in ahorizontal row, and water uses in a vertical column.Each cell in the matrix gets an open envelope.Each participant in the focus group gets a set ofvoting slips, women a different kind from men. Thenumber of slips is equal to the maximum numberof sources a participant could use. However,participants need not finish the slips: the actualbehavior may be less varied than is theoreticallypossible. The team member explains what thedrawings represent and how the activity will bedone. S/he then cross-checks that the activity isclear to all. Participants may vote for more thanone source if they use multiple sources for thesame purposes.For the initial voting, each participant goes behindthe voting screen and selects the sources which(s)he currently uses for a particular purpose afterthe new service came about. For non-sensitiveissues, voting can be done by all simultaneously,by keeping only one row of envelopes open for23 From SARAR and PHAST methodologies.72