Situational Analysis to Understand the Underlying Causes of Poverty/Vulnerability

In CAREs Bangladesh, Nepal, Tanzania, South Sudan and Uganda, a systematic gender and power analysis formed the basis of their program design. Each of these offices underwent extensive analysis exercises – led by consultant Brigitta Bode – rooted in Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) techniques. These approaches aimed to gain a nuanced understanding of local power dynamics and design their initiatives accordingly. These exercises served as both analysis to inform program design as well as training opportunities for staff and partners to gain experience in participatory research and critical analysis.

Adapted from lessons and experiences in analysis, CARE ECARMU has also developed the Situational Analysis for Program Design guidance compendium. This guidance walks through how teams have undertaken:

to inform program design.

Before commencing micro analysis, the team of researchers composed of CARE staff and partners used a Power Mapping exercise to identify the communities for the study. In each country, teams chose one wealthy village and one poorer village in order to understand the different situations the two villages faced despite being near one another.

Planning and Preparations

To prepare teams for research and facilitation, the situational analysis exercises engaged teams to critically reflect on thematic areas for the studies, and develop key questions to guide the study.

Based on these thematic questions, the team then discussed and adapted specific research tools for the inquiries. To help teams reflect on their own facilitation and analysis skills, teams:

  • Engaged in Role-plays and discussion: To identify Dos and Don'ts in effective facilitation
  • Assigned observer roles within teams: To identify and reflect on dynamics in the facilitation, participation and process of each exercise.
  • Presented exercise outputs and observations: To reflect in plenary each day on emerging questions and trends, as well as begin to triangulate findings from across exercises.

 

Field Exercises at the Community Level

In communities, teams undertook a combination of the following exercises.
First, to understand the community and how it has developed, and is organized, the teams engaged:
  • Resource and Power Mapping / Transect Walk: To identify neighborhoods, land types, agricultural and other activities, problems and opportunities.
  • Social Mapping: To identify key resources and location of households, as a first step to understanding resource allocation and politics and in identifying interest groups, relationships and differential access to resources.
  • Village Histories: To probe into key events that have affected the village in terms of health, development, environment, policy, conflict, economics or clan relations.
  • Well-Being and Class Analysis: To identify peoples’ perceptions of the different classes in their community, as a critical first step in establishing interest groups.
  • Dependency Mapping: Used in conjunction with well being grouping to identify the relationships between classes and explore financial arrangements (loans), sharecropping / share-rearing practices, and remuneration (wages).
  • Kinship Analysis: To discover key clusters of social support networks within a community, how they operate to help one another or control certain domains of village life.
    To gain deeper knowledge about livelihood strategies of the poor and very poor within a community, the research teams facilitated a combination of sessions on:
  • Income and Expenditures Pie Charts: To understand the key sources of income within poor households, who earns and who manages income, how income is spent and on whom.
  • Wage Analysis: To analyze the efforts, conditions and pay that laborers receive in for their livelihoods and how gender may affect how laborers are valued or paid.
  • Crop Matrix: To understand the key crops and their yields among poor agriculturalists, examine the division of labor in each step of cultivation, harvest and post-harvest, as well as how poor agriculturists manage their crops and sell their products.
  • Seasonal Calendars: To gain a sense of the work men and women are engaged in across the year, in terms of farming or other productive activities. Further, this exercise can identify lean periods that communities may face each year, and determine how communities cope during times of scarcity.
  • Livelihood Network Analysis: This exercise identified the key relationships held by household heads, and how households within the same network support one another in terms of livelihoods and subsistence. In this way, the exercise seeks to look beyond well-being at the household level to broader clusters to which multiple households belong.

To more closely examine gender roles in these contexts, the teams used a variation of interviews and exercises on the expectations, schedules and interactions of men and women within the community in terms of:

  • Gender Socialization/Child Rearing Practices: To understand how gender is socialized through the different expectations and behaviors toward sons versus daughters within a household, across well-being categories.
  • Field Observation: To observe how women or other marginalized people access public spaces and services, how they assert their voice in public forums and what happens with their opinions.
  • Control over Resources and Decision-Making: To determine how decisions over resources, spending or other aspects of family life are taken between men and women. This exercise also probed into men’s and women’s perspectives on gender and education, livelihoods, marriage practices (dowry, bride-price or child marriage) and child spacing/rearing through their own life experiences as well as those of their children. This exercise also helped uncover individual aspirations for themselves and their children, and gain a sense of what empowerment means for themselves.
  • Gender Norms and Trends Exercise: To understand what the norms and expectations are of men and women around key aspects of life – education, livelihoods, marriage, mobility, etc.  – and how these norms have changed over time.
  • Daily Time Use Exercise: To highlight the daily activities of men and women, separately, and understand gendered divisions of labor, and the value / respect assigned to different tasks that men and women take on.

Finally, to determine how those in power – both formal and informal –relate to one another as well as relate with the poor, teams undertook:

  • Critical Incidents: To look at key conflicts within the community and see what processes were taken to resolve them (who was involved, how was it resolved and in whose favor).
  • Exploitation Analysis: To gain insights into how elites or buyers may ‘squeeze’ the poor in various ways as well as provide a forum for the poor to discuss strategies to counter exploitation.
  • Conflict Role Playing Workshop: To consider situations that provoke violence at the household level, to discuss what happens and why, and how women try and avoid or resolve such violent conflict.
  • Constructing a Power Net: To understand the dynamics of power (domains of influence, relationships of cooperation or conflict) among those in power – both formal and informal – at the community level.
  • Caste Analysis: To identify the caste groupings in the community and lays out the practices and rules associated with caste.

In addition to undertaking these exercises, team members also conducted in-depth interviews with key informants, which included local officials and a spectrum of clan leaders, to learn more about the cultural and political context. These interviews helped teams to identify political practices, relevant policies, changes in cultural norms, the relationship between formal-informal leaders as well as their interactions with the NGO community, and the role of women in both spheres of influence. Following each day in the communities, teams would meet to debrief and reflect on what they found, challenges they faced, and then adapted their plans for the following day.

Applying Research

Deepening Analysis

Following and before the field exercise, the teams undertook research of policy, stakeholders and other literature to better understand the context and develop recommendations on what role CARE could take to contribute to more equitable power relations, gender equality and development in this context.

Program Design

These studies and recommendations formed the basis of program design for CAREs Bangladesh, Nepal, Tanzania and Uganda. Following analyses, teams met to identify and analyze the key under-lying causes of poverty and sharpen their definition of impact groups. Based on this analysis, country office teams develop theories of change, and pathways as well as strategies toward around key groups on whose lives they would like to see positive impact, empowerment and social justice.

Further, to promote exchange and learning across country offices, staff between CARE Nepal and CARE Bangladesh organized an exchange to learn and support one another’s work in action research and analysis.

Developing Initiatives

By taking an approach rooted in social analysis and action with members from across communities, analyses also proved to be critical for identifying opportunities and shaping program strategies.

  • Based on their thorough situational analyses, CARE Bangladesh identified Community Led Total Sanitation as a key entry point to bring together the rich and poor in collaboration for a common community benefit that improved the lives of all segments of a village. This approach not only led to communities freeing themselves from open defecation without external inputs, but also provided a platform from which the poor could demonstrate their capacities and leadership in community development.Further, CARE Bangladesh partners used social analysis to trigger actions in many other spheres of people's lives. Following exploitation analysis, poor women mobilized to challenge traders against unfair practices in the buying of taro root. Further, groups of natural leaders from within communities initiated group projects to end hunger - with groups collectively saving a 'fistful of rice' to guard against hunger season, and collectively cultivating papaya trees as a cooperative income generating activity.
  • Advocacy: In Nepal, analyses on dependency and exploitation led landless laborers to collectively mobilize and demand fair wages from employers during key harvest seasons. This initiative dramatically shifted the working conditions, benefits and wages of farm laborers. In one year, these movements were able to raise a net total of an additional US$2 million dollars in wages for over 13,000 poor men and women.To raise the voice and influence of poor women and dalits in Nepal, teams also used analyses through popular education to identify key priorities for these groups. CARE also worked to federate groups to form a collective voice at the national policy level. In the women's empowerment program, women's groups joined a national rights network, to advocate for policies and regulations in the new constitution that promote the fulfillment of women’s rights and good governance. By working to lift up women’s voices from the grassroots, the initiative has been able to voice and raise awareness on key priority areas facing CARE Nepal’s impact group, influence the drafting of the country's new constitution, and has also facilitate exchanges that bring government policy makers to villages in order to learn about key rights and development concerns among poor women.
  • In the Acholiland Region of Northern Uganda, the situational analysis identified acute needs in terms of access to water. Based on this analysis, teams have used their research to advocate for and seek funding to bring boreholes to remote villages in the north. [need more information on this]

 

Lessons Learnt: Reflections

For this type of research, a number of important process reflections and lessons emerged from teams’ experiences in the field:
  • The importance of preparation: The critical need to invest time to prepare staff to engage in participatory learning and action exercise could not be emphasized more from the experiences across these sites. Time must be dedicated to ensure that the entire team is clear about the objectives and questions guiding the study, as well as the methods involved. From CARE’s experience, staff should have the space and time to learn, practice, critique and improve their facilitation methods as well as the various tools involved in the work. In addition, analyzing power, discrimination and gender issues, requires a deep sensitivity around issues of gender, equity and diversity. To challenge commonly held assumptions or biases, experiences highlighted how trainings on gender, equity and diversity would help staff to reflect on each of these issues, as well as on how their own class might affect how they are perceived or interact with others in the field and on the team.
  • Understanding of the study area and peoples: Researchers should be familiar with the area where research is focused to gain a sense of social dynamics to gauge how to tailor discussions, appropriateness of questions, in addition to discussing how field work fits with larger historical trends and the political economy of the context. In addition research teams should demonstrate a balance of gender, and take into consideration the dynamics surrounding age, or other factors, as well as language to be accessible to all parts of a community.
  • Following an iterative process: Across all exercises, the one strand of continuity has been the fact that each process was co-developed based on the research team, community interactions and findings, and emerging questions. There was no rigid framework or formula to prescribe a series of exercises for the study. Rather, plans were drafted, reflected upon and adapted according to key emerging issues and questions.
  • Learning from one another: Social action and research are skills that are refined and adapted for diverse contexts through practice and reflection. For teams to support one another to develop and adapt these approaches for their own contexts, CARE has found that exchange visits between research teams across country offices have helped in the exchange of experiences and deepen learning about social analysis and action.
  • Sustained support over time: While many of these situational analyses began through intensive, short-term workshops, these one-off events alone are insufficient to support teams to facilitate and analyze participatory learning and action. Rather, teams have shown that sustained follow-up support and guidance across time is essential to ensure that these approaches are effectively integrated into the country office’s ways of working.
  • Creating Linkages across groups, to raise voices and pursue broad-scale change through advocacy alliances and networks: In Nepal, the team found that it was critical to leverage impact by not only linking groups from the grass-roots level of the popular education centers to the national level advocacy network, but also to build horizontal alliances with other organizations engaged in advocacy for women’s rights. The initiative partnered with a local advocacy organization and gained important networking opportunities and levers of influence for the impact group. However, the team is still reflecting how best to manage roles, responsibilities and relationships to ensure that the partnership keeps the rights and voice of poor/vulnerable and socially excluded women at the heart of the work. Further, the team found that a key strength of the initiative has been its flexibility to respond to a changing environment that enables the initiative to respond to emerging issues by leveraging resources from across projects.

 

Resources

  • M Picard (2010). A Composite of Impact Stories Relating to CARE Nepal’s Women’s Empowerment Program.
  • Bode (2009). CARE Nepal: Underlying Causes of Poverty Analysis and Contributions towards a Program Approach. CARE Nepal.
  • B Bode (2009). The Causes and Conditions of Poverty in Acholiland, Northern Uganda. CARE Uganda.
  • B Bode (2007). Power Analysis in the Context of Rights-Based Programming. CARE Bangladesh.
  • S Sharma (2009). Participatory Methods, Processes and Analyses: A handbook for identification of underlying causes of poverty and formulation of strategies. CARE Nepal.