application of the participatory rural …（应用参与式农村u2026）.pdf

APPLICATION OF THE PARTICIPATORY RURAL APPRAISAL (PRA) METHOD I PRA METHOD PRA stands for Participatory Rural Appraisal. Literary translated, PRA means to participatively understand a village/kelurahan. According to the terms PRA represents a group of approaches and methods that will encourage the community of a village to actively participate in raising and analyzing their knowledge of their life conditions in order to create the correct action plan. This means that by implementing PRA the community is facilitated by an outside party—such as researchers, donor or officials—to analuze their life conditions that consists of existing potentials and problems in their village/kelurahan. They are facilitated to develop a program based on those existing potentials—and also the potentials available outside of their village/kelurahan that are possible to be used by the village community—to solve the problems of that community. The formulation of the PRA Method has a background of the long experience from an expert in, Robert Chambers (1983), in the field of community development working in various developing countries. Based on his experience, the community, especially the marginal class, such as the women, farmers, and children, must be involved in every development process. We must listen to their oppinions, complaints, life experiences, hopes and their analysis ability, before we can facilitate them to enable them to create a plan. They are not merely the object of development, we must also help to position them to be development actors. According to Conyers (1984), positioning a community as the development actor is important because of three reasons. The first reason is: the communi