ABSTRACT
Despite several welfare and development programmes, the poor and marginalised communities of rural India continue to struggle to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty and undernutrition. These programmes are often top-down, missing the opportunity to build on the untapped agency of people. Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) meeting cycle is one such proven approach to reach out to the vulnerable communities that stimulate them to understand the causes of ill-health and collectively find local, feasible solutions to address them. This community mobilisation approach is grounded in several field-based studies in different contexts and, at scale, over two decades in India.
Context and Relevance: The unique and sustained community capacity-building approach of the PLA meeting cycle, led by a trained neighbourhood facilitator or a community health worker, has emerged as a potential strategy and is being rolled out in several regions across rural India. With the use of empowering tools like storytelling, games, role-plays and picture cards, the communities find the meetings engaging and the issues relevant, which enables the marginalised communities to take important health-promoting decisions and improve problem-solving skills to act upon them.
In this chapter, we described how a PLA meeting cycle is iteratively developed and unfolds in the field setting, alongside a chronological summary of the impact of participatory women's groups on health and nutrition outcomes, carried out through collaborative efficacy and effectiveness studies in tribal communities of rural Jharkhand and Odisha. This includes findings of scale-ups by government through ASHAs and SHG members as well as initiatives by development partners and civil society organisations. This approach, which addresses a variety of issues such as health, nutrition, education, adolescent health, gender-based violence, mental health and well-being and non-communicable diseases, presents a potentially viable opportunity that needs to be explored through pilots and studies.
