Literature: Who Counts? The power of participatory statistics

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to participatory statistics and their use in international development practice. The book provides a range of detailed case examples of how participatory statistics have been used in monitoring, evaluation and learning, participatory impact assessment, and to influence policy in a wide range of countries. It includes four chapters exploring examples of using participatory statistics for evaluation and three chapters looking at impact assessment.

Examples outlined in the book include:

Measuring Empowerment? – Ask Them: Quantifying qualitative outcomes from people’s analysis - insights for results based management from the experience of a social movement in Bangladesh (108 pages)

Jupp and Ali, 2010, SIDA

Holland's book includes a short summary of Jupp and Ali's book

The book gives a detailed but accessible account of the process used to develop a self-assessment process to measure empowerment for a social movement in Bangladesh focused on land-rights. Describes how participatory methods generated qualitative statements of change that were drawn on to develop a self-assessment matrix used by social movement groups. A parallel process drew on these self-assessments to analyse trends across groups and over time and perform statistical analysis. 

Community groups monitoring impact with participatory statistics in India: reflections from an international NGO collective (10 pages) 

Causemann et al 2013 in Holland 2013 (pages 113-123).

This outlines a process used for self-assessment of changes in income and income inequality, and collaborative development planning by the Karwar Rural Women and Children Development Society working for social justice and sustainable development with indigenous populations in in Karnataka state. More details on some of the methods used in this work can be found in the NGO-IDEAS toolbox.

Scoring perceptions of services in the Maldives: instant feedback and the power of increased local engagement (11 pages) 

Riemenschneider, Barca and Holland 2013 in Holland 2013 (125 – 136)

This describes an evolving evaluation process that combined group and survey based score-cards with conventional surveys and instant analysis and feedback of evaluation trends to stakeholders for validation and learning.

More resources on Participatory Statistics can be found in the Mesh Participatory Statistics resources category.To see how this resource fits in with the rest of Mesh's evaluation resources, and to learn how to navigate them, visit the Mesh evaluation page. 

This resource was developed by Robin Vincent as part of supporting the Wellcome Trust linked community of practice on evaluation of public and community engagement and was originally hosted on the eMOPs website.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License