l it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks;

l it can maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets;

l l it is able to provide net benefits to other livelihoods locally as also widely, both now and in the future; and

l it does not undermine the natural resource base.

Development practitioners use various assessment techniques and tools to design and plan livelihood interventions for a community or an area. The choice and selection of tools for information collection depends on several factors. Procurement of relevant information/ data and project time frame are usually taken into consideration. Often, it is the tool and methodology that plays an important role in determining the project’s effectiveness and success.
Community participation is an important factor in any information collection exercise. Thus, it is a primary means of information collection. In cases where livelihood intervention is the focus, it is important to have a primary and secondary source of information.

It is against this background that Development Alternatives came up with an innovative and easily applicable method called Participatory Livelihood Assessment Technique (PLAT). PLAT is a useful tool either for baseline data collection or for needs assessment. PLAT has a strong combination of participatory methods of information collection backed by related secondary information. This enables cross checking of information from both sources to enable viability and sustainability of the livelihood activities and enterprises identified.

Geographical Coverage

PLAT has been used in three states of India (Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar), covering 21 districts and 210villages by DA. The common issue addressed was the vulnerability of the community to human trafficking. Apart from this, all the three states were marked by differences in geography, socio-economic conditions, natural resources, etc.

PLAT’s Uniqueness

The uniqueness of PLAT lies in its distinction from the two main tools commonly used for undertaking need assessment – PRA and Research. While PRA relies mainly on primary sources, it is a secondary resource, which is the major focus of research.
The significance of primary sources lies in its ability to procure information from the affected community, while secondary sources strengthen the findings of primary sources with other studies, as also various researches conducted in the past. It is useful to have a combination of both sources while undertaking a needs assessment exercise.
This combination is also important in a situation where a development agency intends to multiply the impact of its intervention for the community by either:

l making a connection with the external scenario (in terms of market, policy and other influencing factors); or

l establishing linkages with the existing government schemes and interventions of other agencies.

Process: How DA Applies PLAT

PLAT has been a very useful tool because:

l  it is a standardized methodology

 l  it has standardized formats and guidelines

PLAT was launched on the field as a result of a planned and well-designed process. A Training of Trainers (ToT) was organized for each of the partner Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) on the use of PLAT. The exercise was carried out by taking one project village of each CSO. This enabled the partner CSO to undertake the exercise on its own in the rest of the 9 villages. (Most of the CSOs had one district and each district had 10 villages, except for 2 CSOs; one had 3 and another had 2 districts). In total, the PLAT exercise was undertaken in 210 villages in 21 districts of the three states.

Armed with the tools and techniques, PLAT was conducted by 17 partner CSOs. The uniform and standardized methodology and well-designed formats, coupled with the adoption of flexibility and openness brought in by the participatory principles, greatly contributed in the following achievements:

l  the partner NGO’s ability to learn the methodology within the planned time frame

l  the exercise being successfully conducted in a simultaneous and uniform manner across the 210 sites

l hassle-free collation and analysis of the collected data due to the well- designed and standardized formats

Thus, the use of PLAT threw up a vast amount of information and data, which was collated and then analyzed. The analysis led to the identification of livelihood skills on which the community received extensive following training.

Conclusion

Thus, PLAT emerged from a need for collecting and using reliable baseline data in a short span of time. PLAT is a useful tool in situations where the project timeframe is limited/short and where the baseline information needs to be collected fast and implementation needs to be done on the basis of reliable information/data. However, this does not mean that projects with a longer time frame are excluded from using this tool.