Who Counts?: the power of participatory statistics by Jeremy Holland (with an afterword by Robert Chambers). Available January 2013.
This exciting new book carries 13 case studies of how diverse developmental programs have applied the approach and tools of participatory statistics to measurement and learning. Each case is a unique story about how program implementers and their constituents have themselves have found ways of generating statistically valid quantitative data, as well as quantifying and analysing qualitative data, about the impacts that development interventions are having for constituents themselves.
Participatory statistics is shown to be a practical and cost-effective alternative measurement approach to generating insight and learning in many development contexts where conventional experimental methods are often inappropriate or too expensive. In other words, in most development interventions. But its real value goes far beyond this. The process of generating the data and collectively making sense of it is itself powerfully developmental – enabling communities to effectively take control of their own development.
A great contribution to the movement for changing the way we change the world.