Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA)

Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) is generally described as a systematic but semi-structured activity carried out in the field by a multidisciplinary team, designed to obtain new information and to formulate new hypotheses about rural life. The RRA methodology was developed to overcome the disadvantages of formal survey methods in rural communities, such as the Farming Systems Research approach: time taken to produce results, high cost and low levels of data reliability due to non-sampling errors. A central characteristic of RRA is that its research teams are multidisciplinary and have technical and social science skills that are relevant to the objectives of the survey. The techniques of RRA include (1) interview and question design techniques for individual, household and key informant interviews; (2) methods of cross-checking information from different sources; (3) sampling techniques that can be adapted to a particular objective; (4) methods of obtaining quantitative data in a short time frame; (5) group interview techniques, including focus-group interviewing; (7) methods of direct observation at site level, and (8) use of secondary data sources. RRA therefore does not refer to a single technique but to a range of investigation procedures that take little time to complete, tend to be relatively cheap, and make use of more 'informal' data collection procedures. The techniques rely primarily on expert observation coupled with semi-structured interviewing of farmers, local leaders and officials. RRA has been widely applied in various areas of rural development, for example in health, nutrition, emergencies and disasters, non-formal education, agroforestry, natural resource assessment, sociology approaches, and even agricultural marketing.