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PAHELI stands for People’s Audit of Health,
Education and Livelihoods. It is a rapid assessment of
the prevailing status of human development in a district and covers
four major sectors: life and livelihoods, water and sanitation,
mother and child health, and education and literacy. The
design and execution of PAHELI was done by Pratham and PAHELI
district partners. It was supported by UNDP with participation from
UNICEF.
People’s participation in generating District Human Development
Report Cards:
The exercise has been carried out in States that have prepared State
Level Human Development Reports (HDRs) The aim of these Human
Development Reports (HDRs) have been to highlight the status of
human development across and within states, and ensure adequate
planning and resources for basic sectors like adult literacy,
children’s education, health, livelihoods and poverty reduction.
The district is increasingly becoming an important unit for
planning, budgeting, decision-making and implementation for
development. Recognising this, the State level Human Development
Reports (HDRs) have been followed up with district level HDRs, being
prepared for low Human Development Index districts, These District
level HDRs by and large, rely on secondary data from different
government departments and other sources.
PAHELI is an additional input that could supplement district level
efforts to create District Human Development Reports. PAHELI uses a
participatory approach, simple tools and processes for collecting
primary data.
To facilitate movement from “top-down” methods of planning and
implementation to participatory processes for local engagement, many
methods and mechanisms can be used. At the core of this transition
is the development of local capacities to analyze local situations,
to assess and understand human development gaps and needs, and to
link them to available opportunities and resources. The PAHELI
effort aims to do some of this. In this context, two basic
questions come up:
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Can a simple “tool kit” be developed that can be used by
ordinary people to understand the status of basic human
development in their locality?
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Can a simple set of processes be developed that can be used by
citizens and local groups to generate their own information on
the prevailing state of human development in their area?
For PAHELI, four broad domains were identified and a set of simple
indicators and a tool kit were developed. The sectors are:
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Life & Livelihoods
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Water and Sanitation
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Mother and Child Health
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Education and Literacy
To deepen engagement of the local people and the respondents in
the process of generating the report cards PAHELI uses a
combination of pictorial tools, activities (such as . water
testing, height & weight measurements, salt testing) and
observations.
PAHELI was carried out in 11 selected districts. These
districts are among the poorest districts in their state and are
listed in various “backward” district lists. The actual survey
was carried out by a local citizen’s group or non-government
institution or college of the district. 30 randomly sampled
villages were selected using the 2001 census village lists. 20
randomly sampled households were surveyed in each village.
Adult women in the household were the main respondents.
The PAHELI district human development report cards will
be available shortly for general circulation. The Survey
Tool-kit is attached here
The intent of the Human Development Reports has been to “put
people at the centre to development, by emphasizing that
development is of the people, for the people”. In this context
it is only appropriate that the exercise of generating the
district report card should be done by people of that district
itself and its use subsequently is most powerful at that level.
We look forward to comments, suggestions and inputs on the tools
and relevance of these for monitoring of MDGs and district
planning exercises,
We also look forward to finding out if pictorial tools have been
used in these sectors by others.
For more information: you can contact
UNDP : Seeta Prabhu :
seeta.prabhu@undp.org & Suraj Kumar :
suraj.kumar@undp.org
PRATHAM : Rukmini Banerji:
rukmini.banerji@gmail.com & Shanti Jagannathan (volunteer
for the Survey):
shanti.jagannathan@gmail.com
To download the District Human Development Report Cards,
click here.
To download the Questionnaires used to conduct the survey,
click here.
See
www.pratham.org for all details of ASER 2005/6 tools, processes
and reports. The PAHELI exercise is based on experiences and
learnings from ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) that was
facilitated by Pratham in over 500 rural districts in 2005 and
2006.
The PAHELI
pictorial tools were inspired by a pictorial BPL survey that was
developed in Karnataka some years ago.
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