ABSTRACT
Over the last 20 years a number of communities, development workers, researchers and even some governments, have been exploring the idea of generating statistics through the use of participatory tools and approaches, sometimes as estimates of populations and other times as experiments, for monitoring and evaluation, and in some cases for research. ‘Parti-numbers’ was the nickname adopted by a group of academics, staff from Non-Governmental Organisations and some developing agencies from the north and south, that met a number of times in the early 2000s to discuss whether reliable numbers could be produced through participatory processes. The parti-numbers group created a refreshing and interesting forum for real communication between people coming from different methodological traditions. In a truly participatory tradition, parti-numbers has opened spaces for populations to participate in the production of numbers that will be used to make decisions that affect their lives.
