Unless the providers of services can see for themselves the impact their professional activities are having on the receivers of services they cannot agree to change.

It follows that they, as a group, must be encouraged to assess the outcome of their actions. That is why they are invited to get involved in research activities. Active participation in such studies makes them aware of and knowledgeable about the real difficulties confronting their daily work on  the one hand, and enables them to gain collective understanding on how to overcome these difficulties, on the other . They also learn how to act and  discover what actions are needed to remedy a situation. Research, learning and action thus become inter-linked, inseparable and inter-dependent.

Exposing the deficiencies of a programme can be threatening to the individuals who run it and put them on the defensive. To minimise this threat, Action Learning activities are carried out in groups and every attempt is made to create conditions where participants can examine the strengths and weakness of their programme in constructive manner. This implies that at every stage all members are kept informed of the progress of the project and are invited to participate in all its activities. They are also encouraged to use their initiative and explore aspects that are not part of the main research design but that they themselves consider important enough to solve. Studies carried out with the involvement of the providers of services to this extent get transformed from purely research exercises to tools of social actions.

(excerpted from ‘The Use of Action Learning in Evaluation of Family Planning in India’ by Ali Baquer And Chitra Sundaram)