The challenges of participation in doing community-based participatory action research: Lessons from the Kwithu Project

Background

I left the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1982 to go to the United States for graduate school. Fast forwarding, 32 years later, I am a faculty member in a College in New York City where I teach three courses including action research, a course I designed seven years ago and is now mandatory for candidates preparing themselves to become school district leaders.

In August 2012, I returned to Africa. I received a Fulbright grant to go to Mzuzu University in Mzuzu, Malawi. Malawi is a landlocked country located in the Southern part of Africa below the equator. The country’s population is about 16 million. It is one of the poorest countries in Africa. The per capita gross national income is about US $ 270 per year. Thirty-nine percent of the population is categorized as poor and live on US $ 1 or less a day and 15% is categorized as ultra poor living on less than US $ .50 a day. Malawi has also been severely affected by the legacy of HIV/AIDS. Eleven percent of the population is infected (National Statistical Office, 2009).

When I arrived at Mzuzu University, faculty members and administrative staff were on strike demanding a 75% salary increase to keep up with the cost of living. No one knew how long the strike would last. I used the time to read several educational reports published by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). I also visited Kwithu, a community-based organization (CBO), near my house serving orphans and vulnerable children. I offered to volunteer working in the tomato garden.

Kwithu was established in 2004. Recognizing that the country was experiencing an HIV/AIDS epidemic and many children had become orphans, two women came together to create Kwithu, a Tumbuka word for “our home.” The women started feeding 20 kids a day. But soon the number soared from 20 to 250. The women recognized that feeding alone was not enough. Rather the children also needed education. They started an after-school program for the children to access academic support, participate in recreational activities, and secure financial assistance to pay for school tuition and uniforms.

Kwithu attracts several volunteers. The Kwithu Project started when a volunteer who joined Kwithu to teach English to the children gave an English diagnostic test to a random group of forty 7th and 8th graders (20 boys and 20 girls) and discovered that most of them could hardly read or write in English. The test results shocked us and prompted a meeting of the three of us, Maureen, the teacher, and myself.

This situation was both a challenge and an opportunity for me to do something, to give back to a community that warmly welcomed me. Volunteering at Kwithu opened up an opportunity for research and service. It was tempting for me to craft solutions and tell people what to do because of my experience working in some of the most challenged schools in the New York City public school system. I refrained. I needed to trust the process and respect the knowledge and the experiences of the people. I suggested to Maureen that we meet with the three headteachers of the neighborhood schools, especially those attended by the majority of Kwithu children to discuss English language teaching.

I sat in Maureen’s office when she made phone calls to set up the initial meeting with the headteachers. “Mr. or Ms … . This is Maureen from Kwithu. We would like to make an appointment with you because we want to talk about the education of our children. It is going to be with me and Nathalis.” While to me the purpose of the meeting was English language teaching, Maureen had a better way of explaining this to the headteachers—“the meeting was to talk about the education of our children.”

We met with the three headteachers at Kwithu and we spent more than 2 hours talking. Little did I know this conversation would reframe our initial inquiry focus. One headteacher did not want to hear what we had to say.

Maureen: You mean to tell me that your children are doing very well when they can’t pass a simple test.

Headteacher: It is not as simple as passing a test. There are so many problems that you do not see. We try to do our best.

We learned from this meeting the Luwinga’s school urgent needs. The headteachers completely shifted our focus of inquiry. McTaggart (1997) notes that authentic participation means that participants may reinterpret and reconstitute the whole research and that this cogeneration of knowledge moves participatory action research into the universe of participatory human inquiry.

I wrote this paper for two reasons: (1) to describe and reflect on how people in this disenfranchised community in Luwinga became involved in the school improvement project; (2) to share what I learned about participation in doing community-based participatory action research (CBPAR). Most of us come to participation with the received wisdom about its overwhelming benefits in development. Seldom do we reflect on the diversity of perspectives on participation. The process of participation is not universal and is contingent upon contexts and different cultural norms and assumptions. One challenge of participatory approaches is that they keep evolving in the light of problems of applications and adapting to specific contexts. “Cultural” participation, also referred to as African socialism by scholars studying societies in sub-Saharan Africa, is very common (Amizande, 2013; Chachage & Cassam, 2010). However, this form of participation is imbued with power asymmetry, gender considerations, and absolute deference to the elders.

In the following sections, I first describe the Kwithu project followed by an explanation of the collaborative investigation and the action. In the last section, I discuss the challenges of participation in doing CBPAR.

The Kwithu Project

When we met with the three headteachers at Kwithu, one of them suggested that we organize a meeting and invite community members to talk about education. “It is like in villages. Bring everybody together and let’s talk.” We took the advice and a week later, we invited 15 people to a meeting at Kwithu. Among them were headteachers, parents, students, small business owners, government officials, and CBO and religious leaders. We had prepared an agenda and a set of questions we wanted them to address.

On the day of the meeting, 75 people showed up, including a village chief. Through this much larger than anticipated attendance, we learned that our original sample had not necessarily been representative of the community and the community had taken it into its’ own hands to remedy that. We also learned how eager the community members were for the sort of forum we had created. An uninvited old gentleman in the crowd expressed how happy he was to attend a meeting where community people would talk about children.

Maureen started the meeting speaking both in English and Tumbuka explaining to the participants the reason we had invited them. She mentioned the English test results and the preliminary conversations we had with the three headteachers. She pointed out that the English test results reflected a much deeper problem that we needed to address as a community. “As explained by one headteacher”, she said

Tshizungu (English) is not the main issue. How do you teach a child who comes to school hungry? What do you do when the children have no playground to play at recess, no water to drink. What do you do with schools without pit latrines? We need to focus on the more pressing issues that schools are confronting in Luwinga and find solutions.

I sat in one of the groups listening to a very animated conversation. “You know there are too many problems. Look at the teachers, there are no development funds for teaching materials. The government does not do anything.” To which one of the participants replied “The government does not do anything. We need NGOs. The NGOs can help us.” Another participant comments “NGOs do not help, they are here to do their business. We rely too much on them. We have become too dependent. That is the real problem” (the underlined part was in Tumbuka). An hour later, the participants reconvened and representatives of each group shared what they discussed in their respective group. I will come back to the issues that transpired in the discussions later.

Three additional gatherings took place at Kwithu with the leaders of the seven groups we met with initially. During these meetings participants suggested that we visit schools to have more intimate, targeted discussions about the issues raised in our initial meetings. Although Kwithu was a decent space, to many people who did not use to come there, it felt foreign and intimidating. It was necessary that we meet people in their own locus, their own space so that they can feel more comfortable expressing themselves.

Collaborative investigation

Maureen and I documented all the meetings and collected all the written materials including interview transcripts, focus group notes, flipcharts, observations notes, fieldnotes, pictures, and personal logs. We organized the data by grouping interview responses, focus groups notes, flipchart notes, observations notes, and pictures. We read and reread the materials making annotations categorizing and coding the answers comparing and contrasting the findings. We constructed two sets of matrix, one summarizing the issues identified by the participants and the other describing the suggested solutions.

The group leaders on their part had to make sense of the information collected from the group meetings. We facilitated the process by sharing with them focus groups meetings notes and interviews transcripts. We organized two meetings and invited them to discuss the materials we gave them ahead of time and instructed them to tease out the main themes they felt answered the initial questions we posed. At this meeting, we also asked them to choose pictures they thought illustrated the educational critical issues in Luwinga that we could include in our final report. They spent about an hour matching pictures to the topics discussed and identified 14 pictures they felt illustrated the critical issues in education in Luwinga.

At our last meeting, Maureen and I shared with the group leaders our interpretation of the finding. The group leaders also did the same. This process recognized the group leaders and participants’ expertise against that of professional experts. It was an empowering way of communicating with local expertise to develop decision-making procedures from below rather than imposing policies and prospects from above (Nelson & Wright, 1995). What follows are the issues identified by the stakeholders.

Findings

Participants unveiled a laundry list of educational critical issues cutting across schools including poor teaching and learning conditions, poverty, controversial cultural practices, dilapidated school facilities, poor physical infrastructure, and student health to name a few. Issues specific to a number of schools included but not limited to hunger, lack of water, lack of pit latrines, missing playgrounds, high rates of student dropouts, pregnancies, child labor, parents’ involvement, alcoholism, truancy, etc. I will focus on few issues that cut across schools.

Action

We invited the project participants including the group leaders to identify solutions to these schools problems. They suggested multiple solutions. For example, in terms of improving the teaching and learning conditions, students suggested that parents work together to provide desks to schools; they proposed that schools provide double shifts to alleviate classroom overcrowding; they advocated lobbying the government to establish more printing presses so that the students could have more textbooks; they also suggested that parents contribute bricks, sand, mortar, and building materials so that better school blocks could be built.

Parents laid blame on the government, a legitimate expectation if the government could only live up to its commitment. On the other hand, the adults in Luwinga have witnessed a model of outside control of public schools (especially by NGOs) and the tendency of local communities to cede control and responsibilities for improving the public schools. Because of this massive outside intrusion, a great number of Malawians bear a misconception about who owns their schools. The notion that schools belong to the community was not widely held by the participants. Consequently, communities tended to play almost no role in schools activities.

We learned a great deal from the PAR studios about the struggles people were facing. Our challenge, however, amounted to how to build solidarity around the issues to motivate participants into action. Despite our work with individual schools their issues remained invisible to each other. We wanted to impress on the participants that schools in Luwinga were experiencing similar issues. The pictures I took during the PAR studios inspired me to curate a photographic exhibit (PAR Gallery), an idea that appealed to the group leaders.

The challenges of participation in CBPAR

The concept of participation seduces us because of its assumed universal acceptance despite its multiple implications. Each participatory approach has its own dynamic, which is contingent on circumstances, social, political, economic, and cultural climate in which it operates. Though we all use the same word—participation—the meanings we give the word can be very different. White (1996) writes “The status of participation as a ‘hurrah’ word, bringing warm glow to its users and hearers, blocks its detailed examination … masks the fact that participation can take on multiple forms and serve many different interests” (p. 143).

Democratic Western nations have invested a lot of power and faith into participation. This act of faith relies on three main tenets. First, participation is intrinsically a “good thing” (especially for the participants). Second, a focus on getting the technique right is the principal way of ensuring success of such approaches. Third, considerations of power and politics on the whole should be avoided as divisive and obstructive (Cleaver, 1999).

Where does participation draw its legitimacy remains unclear? There is a lot of confidence vested into it without the understanding that it is merely a tool, not a panacea. There is little evidence of long-term effectiveness of participation in materially improving conditions of the most vulnerable people or as a strategy for social change. While the evidence for efficiency receives some support on a small scale, the evidence regarding empowerment and sustainability is more partial (Cleaver, 1999).

Jules N. Pretty (1995) articulates a strong critique of the concept of participation by distinguishing more and less participatory interventions. He developed a typology of participation that includes seven distinct forms: (1) manipulative participation, (2) passive participation, (3) participation by consultation, (4) participation for material incentives, (5) functional participation, (6) interactive participation, and (7) self-mobilization. Manipulative participation tends to be the extreme and the least participatory. At the other end is self-mobilization, the case of total participation in which all aspects of the intervention are carried out from the bottom up. (For a detailed explanation of each form of participation, see Pretty (1995) in the reference section.)

Thus, participation is a continuum from its tyrannical aspects to self-mobilization aspects. Each participatory project is on a continuum and it is up to the researcher/facilitator and stakeholders to first build the participatory relationship itself (Arieli, Friedman, & Agbaria, 2009) and monitor where they stand on the continuum. This requires authentic and critical participation, a counter to manipulative participation or participacism (participation belief in itself because it seduces us and carries a sense of legitimacy and right). Unless participation is critical and monitored, it bears the tyrannical potential for oppressing the already poor and marginalized whom it seeks to empower (Cooke & Kothari, 2001). Tyranny is the illegitimate and/or unjust exercise of power. Within this context, the more participatory the inquiry the more its outcome will likely mask the power structure of communities (Kothari, 2001). As in most situations the more powerful invites the less powerful. The use of power to ask people to become involved in a situation can easily lead to tokenism. Instead of gaining voice people can easily feel controlled and unable to take action that will endanger the professional identities of those who remain in charge. Another danger is that participation becomes co-opted to purposes predominantly geared to maintain the status quo and has its progressive potential squeezed out (Mullender, Ward, & Fleming, 2013).

At Kwithu, we strived to engage participants in a process of critical participation. Maureen and I were a hybrid group in a sense that I am an academic researcher and she is a well-respected community organizer. We did not have to report to a NGO, a bank, or a funder but only to our stakeholders. We lived in the community. I took time to build trust when I volunteered to work in the tomatoes garden where I had multiple opportunities to talk and introduce myself to as many people as I could. Maureen and I were not afraid to share power with the participants or even follow their recommendation when they suggested, for example, that we meet with people in their respective schools. This suggestion, I guessed, was made out of the concern that the level of participation in the larger group tended to be limited.

There is a strong assumption that meaningful participation in public meetings is evidenced by individual (verbal) contribution (Cleaver & Kaare, 1998). There were different groups of participants. Some spoke English, others did not. Some issues were confidential and participants were not willing to share those in public. There were men and women, elders and younger acting within limited cultural norms. For example, in a study conducted in Tanzania, it was revealed that when women spoke at public village meetings, they were representing women. When men spoke, they were speaking as individuals (Cleaver & Kaare, 1998). I would not rule out that some people came to the meeting to make sure that their interests will be represented. In any case, these individual meetings started the PAR studios.

By creating alternative meeting spaces—the PAR studios—Mauren and I began to address the limitations experienced in the large focus group meetings. The participants ran the PAR studios managing the participation process in their own terms. They designed the agenda, facilitated the meeting, and decided on some priorities. They also set up some basic rules in terms of interaction. For example, participants were free to express themselves in Timbuka, Shewa, or English; they took turn to speak; we made clear that they would not be any hierarchy in terms of decision-making and more importantly each individual had something to contribute. These simple rules gave ownership to the stakeholders as Maureen and I became the monitors of the critical participatory process by giving ongoing feedback on the process to the facilitators.

The PAR studios provided a space for joint analysis and development of action plans. The stakeholders experienced participation as a right not just a means to achieve project goals. They expressed multiple perspectives. Conflicts emerged especially when the group had to decide on priorities. White (1996) explains that the absence of conflict in many supposedly “participatory” programs is something that should raise our suspicions. Change hurts. Creating consensus around priorities was a serious challenge. Group decision-making and consensus building although in the hands of the group members might definitely be imbued with various degree of soft tyranny (Hauschildt & Lybaek, 2006) and gentle level of coercion.

If the PAR studios helped us monitor and to some extent ensure the integrity of the participatory process, the PAR gallery created solidarity around the issues and motivated the participants to action. Maureen and I expected some form of action; however, we did not think that the PAR Gallery would necessary be the venue for it. The pictures displayed in the gallery moved the participants from interactive participation to self-mobilization. It challenged the participants to take initiative and begin to change the system. They developed contacts with external institutions for resources and technical advice while retaining control over how resources were used.

Participation, notwithstanding its universal appeal and acceptance is truly complex. Several of its aspects need rehabilitation that ought to start with a more serious consideration of power relation. It is essential that participation be sustained, critical and monitored so that even in instances where the stakeholders have ownership of the process it does not conceal unequal relationships of power and conflict. Scholars researching participation suggest that those using participatory approaches “put their house in order” by considering own internal hierarchical structure making the researcher him/herself an object of research (Hildyard, Hedge, Wolvekamp, & Reddy, 2001). Hence, CBPAR practitioners’ role is to first challenge their own sources of power to provide the space necessary for a community to be self-determining. The commitment to changing the conventional power structure is integral to CBPAR’s agenda for critical participation and real community change (DeMond, Rivera, & Gonzales, 2011).