5

This chapter describes and evaluates participatory

methods that were developed to enable children in Nepal
to document and reflect on the democratic functioning of
their own organizations. It concludes with an assessment
of the potentials of participatory methods for self-
monitoring by democratic organizations of young people.

Using Participatory Methods to

Further the Democratic Goals of
Childrens Organizations
Roger A. Hart, Jasmine Rajbhandary

Childrens clubs have emerged since 1990 as an important new kind of insti-
tution in Nepal. They appear to be both an expression of and a promise for
the advancement of democracy and childrens rights in a new democracy.
Although Nepali children have long been able to demonstrate their compe-
tencies in collaborative agricultural work with their families and commu-
nities, this has not in the past extended to community decision making or
to the creation of projects that they themselves initiate. The progress of the
childrens clubs has been a remarkable natural experiment in the different
ways that children, ages eight to sixteen, can be involved in the manage-
ment of their own organizations. This is because the children were encour-
aged to develop the clubs largely by themselves with modest training and
with few external constraints on their activities or functioning. In this chap-
ter, we describe a participatory evaluation with those clubs that has been
supported by Save the Children Norway and Save the Children USA,
referred to collectively throughout this chapter as Save the Children.
The clubs were not initially developed as part of a conscious decision
by the agencies to spawn a new kind of institution on a grand scale. They
emerged through a combination of factors, of which the desires of the chil-
dren themselves were central. Many villages and some urban neighborhoods
received training in the child-to-child approach to health education and
development (Aarons and Hawes, 1979). Following this training, the chil-
dren did not want to stop meeting and so were enabled to form their own
clubs where they could design their own recreational activities and projects

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR EVALUATION, no. 98, Summer 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 61
62 YOUTH PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION

to help their communities. A major factor enabling this progressive exper-

iment to take place seems to have been the prior establishment in these
communities of highly democratic womens groups sponsored by the same
international nongovernmental organizations. Field staff noted informally
that the childrens clubs seemed to be relatively balanced in gender, were
remarkably inclusive of different ethnic groups and castes, and were being
run by children with a great degree of independence and competence. The
senior program staff of Save the Children had felt that these qualities sig-
naled the emergence of an important new kind of institutional opportunity
for children, with great significance for Nepal but also possibly for other
countries. Nepal is a relatively new democracy, and in recent years, many
new openings for the development of civil society have appeared, particu-
larly involving women. Childrens organizations, however, have not been
part of any national plan (Shrestha, 1998). Save the Children felt that it was
necessary to learn how well the clubs functioned as democratic childrens
organizations. They appeared to be fulfilling the goals of the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child for children to freely gather, to have
a voice in matters that concern them, and to act on their rights. But how
authentic was childrens participation, and what activities were the children
carrying out?

Larger Research Study

The national goals of the research, as identified by Save the Children, were
to provide an account of the current membership patterns, structures, and
functioning of the clubs and to critique these from the perspective of ful-
filling childrens rights to participate. This called for a sequential three-
phased program of research: first, a historical phase where we traced the
growth of the clubs through archives and interviews of the two sponsoring
agencies; next, a survey of 140 clubs to obtain a broad picture of the clubs;
and last, detailed participatory evaluations with twenty-two clubs
(Rajbhandary and Hart, 1999). These participatory evaluations are the
focus of this article. A primary goal of this work was to develop participa-
tory methods that children could continue to use to periodically review
their own functioning. But we also wanted to understand issues of power
within the clubs. Toward this end, we conducted individual semistructured
interviews with key informants, child club members and nonmembers, and
their parents. The idea was that we would bring all of these additional data
back to the children for a collective concluding discussion with them, but
this often turned out to be an overambitious goal because we had only
ten days in each of the communities. At the end of the study (in 1999),
a four-day National Review Workshop on the Child Club Study Recom-
mendations was held in the capital, Kathmandu. This was designed to
enable thirty-four children and club advisers to help interpret the findings
and to improve the list of recommendations that emerged from them. Two
 FURTHERING THE DEMOCRATIC GOALS OF CHILDRENS ORGANIZATIONS 63

Figure 5.1. Most clubs had no meeting space of their own, so the
research often had to be conducted outdoors

clubs from each of the districts where Save the Children had clubs were
invited to send two club members and two advisers as representatives
(Figure 5.1).

Critical Review of the Participatory Group Methods

Many methods have been designed to enable people to look critically at their
own communities but none that enable groups to comment on how well they
function as participatory democratic organizations. We designed methods
that would help the children to look critically at the membership patterns,
decision-making structure, and processes of their organization. We also cre-
ated methods that enabled them to systematically identify the activities in
the club, how these compared with other settings in their lives, and how well
they satisfied the desires of the older and younger children and boys and
girls. Among the central principles were that the methods needed to be sim-
ple and clear to a group unschooled in the use of such methods and that the
64 YOUTH PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION

analysis and interpretation of the data had to be carried out with the groups
themselves (Boyden and Ennew, 1997; Chambers, 1997; Driskell, 2002;
Hart, 1997; Johnson and others, 1995, 1998; Pretty and others, 1995).
Furthermore, we had to design the methods with the knowledge that many
of the children in the clubs had not attended school and were not literate.
This involved considerable experimentation. In addition, the methods
needed to be able to be completed fairly rapidly because the children work
extremely long hours and have little free time. Some of the participatory
group methods were borrowed and modified from the literature on partici-
patory research with adults (Pretty and others, 1995; Chawla, 2001). Others
were developed specifically for this study. The methods were pilot-tested in
one club and then used in twenty-two clubs sampled from the districts where
the two international agencies worked in the mountains and plains of the
country. We offer here a brief description and evaluation of the relative effec-
tiveness of each of these participatory methods.
Understanding Patterns of Social Exclusion. We first asked the chil-
dren in our pilot community to construct a normal geographic or euclidean
map as the base map for a social census. The children greatly enjoyed this
activity, and if there is plenty of time, we recommend the method for its
value as a warm-up activity. It is important that the children first use loose
materials such as yarn and pieces of cardboard and subsequently fix it with

Figure 5.2. Map making using yarn, cardboard, stones, and other
loose parts
 FURTHERING THE DEMOCRATIC GOALS OF CHILDRENS ORGANIZATIONS 65

crayons (Figure 5.2). If pencils or crayons are used first, it is difficult for
children to create a collective expression that they can all agree on.
The map enabled children to identify nonclub members in each house-
hold and allowed for discussion about why this might be the case. It also
resulted in such a good base map that it would be valuable in community
planning. But we concluded that it was too slow a technique, and so we
designed a more streamlined technique that we call social mapping
(Figure 5.3).
Social mapping provides a rapid census of a community. It enables an
analysis of the degree of inclusiveness of club membership and whether
distance is a factor influencing the pattern of exclusion. This method
could also work for the analysis of other organizations, including schools.
The social map is designed to emphasize distance rather than spatial loca-
tion. The base map is simply a series of circles representing five-minute
travel distances away from a dot representing the club. Drawing a cross as

Figure 5.3. The much more rapid Social Mapping method

66 YOUTH PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION

a template over the series of circles creates a series of quadrants that

enables children to place their homes in their approximate location to one
another. This cross is not important to the analysis, but we learned that
some children want to locate their homes relative to their neighbors, and
this helps them to do so. Children write their names on a small paper
house representing their home. They place this house on the map at
the correct distance from the club. They then add information about the
demography of their household to their template using different-colored
symbols.
The social map was extremely successful. Children rapidly placed their
homes and enthusiastically used the map to describe their households.
Children of all ages in the clubs had no difficulty understanding the task. It
worked well for enabling children to see patterns of exclusion and to dis-
cuss them. To have the children make a traditional map of their community
can take many hours longer.
Categorizing and Ranking Participation in Activities. We used the
movement game and card sorting and ranking as an active way to get club
members to begin to see patterns in their different types of participa-
tion and roles in their organization. We thought that it would be a more
active and hence more engaging alternative to the card-sorting approach
described below. Children were simply asked to form lines that expressed
the degree of some different quality, beginning with the child who has the
most of that quality. For some issues, it might be sufficient for them to sim-
ply form groups to show activities that they do or do not participate in. The
easiest example to begin with was, Who is the tallest child? Children
then enjoyed debating noisily while they tried to answer such challenges
as Who are the children who laugh the most? before going on to such
useful questions as Who attends the most meetings?
With small groups of fewer than twenty, this can be a useful way of
breaking up the boredom that can set in with too much sitting, particularly
with younger children. But with a large group, we found it to be a cumber-
some and rather anarchic method compared with the simple sorting
of name cards. If the children are literate or can at least read one anothers
names, card sorting is preferable in terms of speed and coherence unless, of
course, they really need to stretch their legs.
Cards were used to enable children to show patterns of participation in
different types of activities or in different roles. Children each wrote their
name or a little picture on a small card to express their identity. The chil-
dren could then place these cards in groups on the floor to show what they
do together. By using these cards of different colors to express age or sex,
children were able to see patterns more easily. They also placed them in
order of frequency of participation, as with the movement ranking game.
We used this method for children to show us who participated in which
types of activities and which training workshops. The method was fast and
efficient but relatively boring for the children to carry out. It did, however,
 FURTHERING THE DEMOCRATIC GOALS OF CHILDRENS ORGANIZATIONS 67

enable the children to easily see and discuss patterns of involvement and
exclusion in activities.
Understanding Organizational Structure and Decision Making.
Arranging cards into diagrams enabled the children to portray the struc-
ture of the club in terms of different roles and decision-making responsi-
bilities. It used the same materials as card sorting for categorizing and
ranking: colored cards expressing different sex and age groups on which
the children write their name or an icon to express their identity. The chil-
dren then arranged these cards into diagrams (Figure 5.4). They clustered

Figure 5.4. Organizational diagrams enabled the children to portray the

structure of the club in terms of different roles and decision-making
responsibilities
68 YOUTH PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION

the cards to show which groups of children have different responsibilities

and what the relationships of these groups were to one another. First they
created a diagram of the official positions in the club, such as the execu-
tive structure and committees. They then created a diagram using another
set of their name cards to show all of the different things that children do
informally and for which the club has no formal recognition or title.
This method was rapid and effective. It sometimes created a good deal
of argument about who really did what. We learned from this method that
whereas most established clubs are self-managed, this is largely by the mem-
bers of the elected executive committee. Sometimes the children came up
with spontaneous suggestions for new committees. Clearly this would be a
valuable monitoring method.
Comparing the Benefits of Different Settings. The use of a simple
matrix enables children to identify what benefits they feel they get from dif-
ferent settings in their lives. Boys and girls and younger and older children
can express their different perspectives on the same chart, thereby enabling
valuable discussion on why they have different ideas about these benefits.
The matrix can be drawn on paper or in the dirt (Figure 5.5).
Categories of settings in the childrens daily lives (school, home, work,
club, free time, the childrens club, and festivals) are expressed on one axis
in words and pictures. Categories of different qualities of these different set-
tings are expressed on the other axis, again in words and pictures. These
categories were identified through interviews with children in the pilot
phase of the project and from the identification of intended club values by
Save the Children staff in an earlier phase of the project. With a large group,
the matrix needs to be hung on a wall so that children can form small
groups in front of it. In this research, children formed four groups based on
gender and whether they were younger or older than twelve years.
The method was easy for children of all ages to understand, and the
children were highly engaged in small-group discussion while carrying it
out. It led to excellent discussion among the groups of children on differ-
ences in their judgments about the benefits that they felt they got from
different settings.
Revealing Decision-Making Patterns. We learned from the com-
parative benefits and card-arranging methods that the children are receiv-
ing more encouragement and recognition as decision makers and effective
actors in the clubs than in any other setting in their lives. However, there
are still adult influences, and they are not always positive. It is difficult to
get at the subtle ways that adults, often unwittingly, subvert childrens
own desires and competencies by falling into their familiar patterns of
directing and controlling children or reducing childrens roles to those
of tokens. Some kinds of influence are not readily mentioned in group dia-
logues because of the adoption of a collective language of self-deception.
This is commonly the case in programs that are consciously promoting
child participation because adult advisers often naively believe that young
 FURTHERING THE DEMOCRATIC GOALS OF CHILDRENS ORGANIZATIONS 69

Figure 5.5. The comparative-benefits chart shows the benefits of

different settings in the childrens daily lives

people should be entirely free from adult influence, and so they will deny
their influence! We believe that some adult influence on a childrens orga-
nization is not only to be expected but is healthy. But these influences
should also be part of an evaluation. To establish a basis for discussion,
we used drama to reveal the subtle patterns of adult power and influence
in the clubs.
We told the children that we wanted to discuss with them how deci-
sions are made in the club and suggested that it would be useful if we first
did some acting. We asked them to act out some situations that may not
have happened yet in their club or that might never happen. We suggested
different scenarios and asked them to create a little play about each of them.
Groups of children in the pilot community first used puppets but rejected
them after concluding that they constrained their acting too much.
Performance, particularly dance, was common for the children, and many
children also had experience with community theater. The issues that we
chose for the scenarios were age of graduation from the club, ejection of
people from the club for a bad problem of discipline, how elections are run,
70 YOUTH PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION

and how decisions are made about who will attend training workshops. For
example, children were asked to imagine that someone who had just
reached the upper age limit (usually sixteen years old) wished to stay in the
club and then were instructed to make a play about how this persons
request would be considered. They had to think who would be involved in
the decision and to create the cast of characters. They then gave a perfor-
mance to show how the decision was made. If the actors got stuck and did
not know what to say next, they could ask the audience of other club
members for help. After each of the skits, the children who were not per-
formers commented on the accuracy of the performance as an expression
of what would have really happened. Then all of the club members were
asked to discuss the scenario and to consider whether they could improve
on how they might deal with this issue if it were to come up in the future.
This method worked extremely well for inspiring discussion on this
subtle question. But because the performances were time-consuming, there
was often insufficient time for the analysis and interpretation of the sce-
narios by the children; the method itself became too much of the focus.
Comparing Activity Preferences. A matrix was designed to enable
boys and girls of different ages to systematically compare their favorite activ-
ities in the club with one another and with other activities that they would
like to see happening in the club. First of all, it is essential that the list of
activities that are to be compared with one another be generated by the
maximal number of group members. Children formed themselves into four
groups: girls and boys younger and older than twelve years. Each group
identified three favorite activities: one that they currently carried out in the
club, one that they carry out outside the club, and one that they do not do
anywhere but wish they could do in the club. We found that the most effec-
tive way to engage all of the children in this process and to think openly
with the peers in their subgroup was to have them plan short mime skits of
favorite activities that they then performed for the rest of the members
(Figure 5.6).
Altogether, twelve categories of activities were generated. These were
used to create a twelve-by-twelve matrix. The names of the categories
were written along the horizontal and vertical axes. These categories were
also identified by different colors and simple picture symbols to make
them accessible to nonliterate children. The matrix was hung on a wall,
and the four groups of children sat in groups in front of it. For each pair
of comparisons on the chart, each group discussed among themselves
before choosing which their favorite was. They then placed a colored dot
on the chart to reveal their preference. At the end of all of the paired
choices, the scores were tallied up by the children to see what the rank-
ing of activity preferences was for each group. These lists were drawn up
for each group so that the children could compare the four different sets
of rankings. They compared the lists of younger boys and girls and older
boys and girls against their current club activities (Figure 5.7). They used
 FURTHERING THE DEMOCRATIC GOALS OF CHILDRENS ORGANIZATIONS 71

Figure 5.6. Acting out skits of preferred activities is a way of

establishing categories for the preference-matrix method

these comparisons to discuss the degree to which interests of all groups

were being equally recognized. This was then used for a discussion of
what changes in the range of activities carried out by the clubs would
be possible.
The use of skits to generate activities was greatly enjoyed by the chil-
dren and served to liberate their ideas, but there was a tendency among
some of the younger children to focus on activities that they would enjoy
performing rather than what was truly a most-favored activity. This needs
to be taken into account in introducing the method to young children.
Nevertheless, the method successfully gave a voice to both younger children
and to girls and led to a much greater inclusiveness and degree of discus-
sion in each club than had hitherto been known. For example, in one club
a strong discussion ensued regarding club expenditures on football team
uniforms (solely a boys activity). The discussions that were stimulated by
this method also enabled the children to explore why this was not happen-
ing and what might be possible.
The method was unnecessarily long because the children waited for
each group to show their preferences on the same chart. Although this pro-
cess illustrated differences between groups (that is, age and sex) it took an
enormous amount of time to complete the activity. One improvement might
72 YOUTH PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION

Figure 5.7. The use of the preference-matrix method to enable

groups of younger and older boys and girls to systematically
compare their club activities with one another

be to carry out the activity separately with each of the different age and sex
groups and only bring the children together to compare their different data
after they have each completed their analyses.
Identifying External Influences. Venn diagrams were used to enable
children to collectively identify all of the people and organizations that have
any influence on the running of their club. The children were given pieces
of cards of different size, color, and shape to arrange on the floor around
their club, as represented by one large piece of card. They were told that
they could display these cards to express how much influence different
organizations or people have on their club. They used the size of the cards
 FURTHERING THE DEMOCRATIC GOALS OF CHILDRENS ORGANIZATIONS 73

Figure 5.8. The use of Venn diagrams for children to identify all
of the people and organizations that have any influence on the
running of their club

P
Key:
P P P P P = Parents
A = Adults
YC = Youth club
A WG = Womens group
Shankheswari Bal C-t-C = Child-to-child
SCUS = Save the Children
Club (Nuwakot)
A CB/CD = Community based
child development
CDA CDA = Child development
assistant
CB/CD
C-t-C = Organization
SCUS
= Individual male

YC WG = Individual female

to express the relative amount of influence and color or shape to show the
type of organization or whether it was a person or an organization. If it was
a direct influence, then the card should touch the club card. If it were an
indirect influence, then the card would be placed some distance from the
club or would touch another card, which in turn touched their club card
(Figure 5.8).
The method was at first too complex. We had cards that differed in
sizes, shapes, and colors and placed at different distances away from the
club. There were too many variables for the children to think of and some-
times led to confusion. We concluded that it is necessary to lay out fewer
types of card options for classification and to proceed slowly so that all chil-
dren can remember what organization each person or card stands for. We
placed initials on the card and found that children remember these, even if
they cannot read, as long as one proceeds systematically and slowly. When
children were all clear about the meaning of the symbols, this method
greatly improved their ability to have a group discussion on external rela-
tionships and influences on their organization. From this method, children
were able to rethink how to relate to local organizations, and we were able
to make some useful recommendations to Save the Children regarding the
provision and training of advisers.
74 YOUTH PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION

Limits of Participatory Group Methods

In this study, issues of exclusion, status, and power were the focus of delib-
erations between the children. However, there was a disconnection
between what the children discussed and how they discussed it; our meth-
ods picked up only what was said. No systematic record was made with the
children of their patterns of talk, such as who never spoke or who spoke
only after first observing the responses of someone else, although one
could imagine such research. Even though the children in the Nepal clubs
had all learned about equal rights to participate, it was obvious during our
participatory group methods that children were often waiting on the
response of the leaders before stating their own position. There appears
to be a great tendency in Nepali culture for people to defer to the more
influential or respected members of any group. This is a major challenge
for participatory methods with any group in any culture. Two strategies
helped correct for this. First, we broke the club members up into separate
age and gender groups because age and sex seemed to hold a strong influ-
ence. Second, we asked children to each pause and to make their individ-
ual decisions before talking with their group. We were told that these
strategies enabled children to have a much greater dialogue across caste,
ethnic, and gender lines than was normally the case in club meetings.
These discussions led the children to understand their organization in new
ways, suggesting that these methods could be valuable as ongoing tools for
decision making within the clubs.

Participatory Monitoring Could Further Democratic

Goals
It was clear to us from the childrens discussions of the data that this was
the first time they had articulated most of these issues inclusively and
openly. From this, we concluded that these kinds of methods should not
only be used in evaluations but, more important, they could be used in
ongoing ways by any group that wishes to function more democratically.
But there is a need for more methodological experimentation. In particular,
we need to find ways to enable children to focus on each others deeds as
well as words. Certainly the children were learning from what each other
said about their roles and preferences, but they were not commenting on
how they were working together and responding to one another in the
meetings that we facilitated. We enabled children to see their own patterns
of decision making, but we did not find ways of sustaining the dialogue and
providing opportunities for the children to probe deeply into differences.
What made it possible for the children themselves to initiate dialogues of
injustice after analyzing their data was their prior understanding of their
rights because they had all been introduced to the U.N. Convention on the
Rights of the Child and its articles on equality of opportunity.
 FURTHERING THE DEMOCRATIC GOALS OF CHILDRENS ORGANIZATIONS 75

Although we were successful at supporting the children to see their

own patterns of decision making during our visit, it is unclear whether the
clubs were going to subsequently incorporate these methods into their
ongoing practice because we would have needed to spend more time train-
ing the children how to use the participatory evaluation methods. If the
kinds of methods described here could be used periodically for self-
monitoring, children who are not normally given a voice would be heard,
and we believe that this would lead to a much larger number of children
becoming involved in the decision making and management of their orga-
nization. This kind of participation would require that advisers be trained
to believe in childrens capacities for research, evaluation, reflection, and
self-determination and to be trained in evaluation facilitation. They, in turn,
would need to train all of the children in participatory group processes
rather than teaching leadership skills to the few.

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ROGER A. HART is professor of environmental psychology in the doctoral

Psychology Program of the Graduate School and University Center of the City
University of New York and co-director of the Childrens Environments
Research Group.

JASMINE RAJBHANDARY is head of the Advocacy Support Unit of Save the

Children (U.K.) in Nepal.