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MIS: A Management Information System is one offour components that establish an efficient policymonitoring system (see Section 5). MIS is used tocollect, analyse, store, and disseminate informationuseful for decision-making in a project. It trackstargeted indicators that help inform choices in aproject. Design of the MIS should be based on theprinciples of adaptation to user needs, and availabilityof resources, user participation, parsimony,and simplicity. It is important to understand fullywhat needs to be monitored.National symposium: This is a high-profile way topublicise Legal Empowerment of the Poor or otherpolicies.Opportunity Ranking: This is used to help communitymembers and development partners decideupon which projects to start implementing. Takingaccount of locally available resources, skills, andcapacities, it is built around a scoring system thatranks various options against agreed criteria.Outreach: Methods for publicizing Legal Empowermentof the Poor or other policies include mediacampaigns, school programmemes, public speakingengagements, publications, public hearings, studycircles. (Study circles, for example, are a method ofadult education and social change popular in Scandinavia._Para-professionals: These are people in variousoccupational fields, such as education, healthcare,and law, who have obtained a certificate by passingan exam that enables them to perform a task requiringsignificant knowledge, but without having theoccupational license to perform at the professionallevel in the field.Participatory budgeting: Participatory budgeting isa process of democratic deliberation and decisionmaking,in which ordinary residents decide how toallocate part of a municipal or public budget. Participatorybudgeting is usually characterised by severalbasic design features: identification of spendingpriorities by community members, election ofbudget delegates to represent different communities,facilitation and technical assistance by publicemployees, local and higher level assemblies todeliberate and vote on spending priorities, and theimplementation of local direct-impact communityprojects. Various studies have suggested that participatorybudgeting results in more equitable publicspending, higher quality of life, increased satisfactionof basic needs, greater government transparencyand accountability, increased levels of publicparticipation (especially by marginalised residents),and democratic and citizenship learning.Participatory Poverty Assessments: A PPA is a toolthat allows consultation of the poor directly. Findingsare transmitted to policymakers, thereby enablingthe poor to influence policy. APPA uses a variety offlexible participatory methods that combine visualtechniques (mapping, matrices, diagrams) and verbaltechniques (open-ended interviews, discussiongroups). It also emphasises exercises that facilitateinformation sharing, analysis, and action. The goalis to give the intended beneficiaries more controlover the research process. To ensure follow-up atthe community level (a principle of participatory research),many PPAs have involved the developmentof community action plans subsequently supportedby local governments or NGOs (Robb, 2000).Plain language: In many countries, the law is onlydrafted and administrated in the national language,which many of the poor may not speak or read.Translation of laws into local language is hence anobvious way of improving access of the poor to information.This may also involve rendering legal jargoninto everyday terms in the dominant country language.Policy briefings: These are summary reports that re-339