ABSTRACT
I have known Robert Chambers for more than 15 years. As an anthropology student at the Institute of African Studies, University of Nairobi, Kenya, I had neither come across his work nor had I heard about Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). I had not even seen or read his famous book, Rural Development: Putting the Last First (Chambers, 1983). I only came to learn about his work much later as I began to grapple with how to work with communities in Kenya as a development worker. As the small local NGO I worked for was funded through Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), I had been inducted to Ziel Orientierete Projekt Planung (Goal-Oriented Project Planning, ZOPP), the German version of Logical Framework Analysis. I began simplifying ZOPP to make it more suitable for working with communities in Kenya. Community Oriented Project Planning (COPP) became the name for our simplified version of ZOPP. In my search for more practical participatory methodologies to work with communities, I came across literature on PRA and developed an interest in Robert’s work. I later had an opportunity to work with him at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), where I was the networking and capacity-building coordinator from 2001 to 2007. My work with Robert focused on promoting and deepening understanding of participation and participatory methods through linking practitioners from around the globe to share experiences and learn from one another.
