Stichting Connect International

PRA stands for Participatory Rural Appraisal.
A PRA is a meeting with community members in which the community members look in different ways at their lives and the problems they have, and then prioritize their problems. A PRA enables a community to determine which problems they would like to tackle first and also helps to motivate people to start working on these problems.

A Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) consists of:

1. a number of participative group activities executed by community members,
2. a selection by the community members of a committee, and
3. a focus group discussion with community leaders, project committee and key resource persons.

During the participative group activities the community members assess their circumstances, their needs and priorities. This will form the basis for plans they can make later on for improvements with regard to these subjects. The aim of the focus group discussion is to obtain further information about a number of subjects and in particular about the subjects that were given high priorities. The PRA is usually followed by a baseline survey.

The PRA manual is also included in the community coach manual (in combination with another self-assessment method, the Appreciative Inquiry, or AI). The PRA manual can be downloaded here for free.