Context

Local Livelihoods provides in-house facilitation to assist organisations to build capacity. We use participative methods to build teams, boards and partnerships.

We can provide:

·  Training in participative methods for trainers and facilitators and in-house, for organisations to use for their own development.

·  The Participation Toolkit - a 50 page manual which brings together 35 participatory exercises from around the world.  The range of exercises is suitable for problem analysis, team building, review and evaluation, community engagement, planning, project design, partnership structuring, group facilitation, group self-help, scoping and mapping.            

·  Participation Facilitator - a software programme that contains five participatory exercises. It can be used in workshops to give immediate feedback, print information and contribute to planning and evaluation reports (in Development).

Facilitating Participatory Workshops

Participation can increase the effectiveness of development projects: building capacity within groups is an important objective of participatory approaches and if people are genuinely involved in decision making they will have a greater degree of commitment and shared objectives are more likely to be met.

This toolkit contains a brief list of some participatory training and workshop facilitation techniques that are easy and quick to use. These exercises have been compiled from numerous sources: some are new and some have been used in many countries for many years. We have only included exercises that are suitable for engaging with stakeholders: care should be taken that participatory exercises don’t cause embarrassment or make people feel uncomfortable. They can be used as training and development exercises, or can be used instead of a meeting to deal with issues for discussion.

Key principles for participation workshops

• Communicate clearly what will happen and the order in which it will proceed

• Respect local knowledge and skills; facilitate local people to undertake their own analysis of the situation

• A learning process as much as an outcome - sharing of ideas and information

• An approach and attitude rather than a set of technical skills

• Respect and encourage individuality

• Relate new material to information and skills that are already known