Tool: Participatory Exercise in Gender Analysis: What is Poverty? Who is Poor?
The following tool is a participatory exercise that may be used when conducting gender analysis with the participation of client communities. It helps analyse gender differences in patterns of poverty.
Purpose: To determine what poverty means in a particular community, and to enable the community to decide which of its members should be targeted to receive the most assistance.
Time: 1 hour
Audience: Primarily community members; also useful for trainers, project staff and field workers.
aterials needed:
- Three drawings of a man, a woman, and a couple.
- Three labels: rich, average, and poor.
- Fifteen cards depicting different possessions: furniture, animals, radio, garden, trees, bicycle, chickens, crops, maize, cart, fruit tree, money, goat, vegetables, construction materials.
How to conduct the exercise:
[This activity can be made simple or complex depending on the purpose. For example, the activity can be stooped at step four.]
- Begin by placing the three labels--rich, average and poor--on the ground, side by side. Then, place and spread out the fifteen cards randomly below the labels so that they can be viewed by all of the participants.
- Ask the participants to discuss and categorise the cards by placing them in vertical columns, depending on whether the possessions are likely to be owned by rich, average or poor people in the community. Ask the participants to draw or write on blank cards any possessions not depicted on the cards. Participants may also want to include characteristics or attributes associated with different levels of wealth (such as powerlessness, happiness, sense of belonging, and number of children).
- After a consensus has been reached on who is likely to own which possessions, ask participants to identify three cards that most characterise each group.
- Remove the labels and again mix up the cards. Now use the drawings of a man and a woman to indicate whether a household is headed by a man or woman. Ask participants to categorise the cards again on the basis of whether there are differences in wealth or well-being between male and female-headed households.
- Finally, ask the participants to categorise the actual families in the community in terms of whether they are rich, average, or poor. Names of families can be written on slips of paper. Allow for ample discussion until consensus is reached. Ask whether this activity should be done with confidentiality.
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