Strengthening Rapid Assessments in Urban Areas: Lessons from Bangladesh and Tanzania

Understanding urban issues is extremely important for programming, especially for organizations that have traditionally focused on assisting poor households and communities in rural areas. Development organizations and governments frequently use rapid assessment methods because they have limited resources and little time to devote to longer-term, more complex research projects. Generally these methods employ qualitative techniques to solicit information from relatively small numbers of people in a short time. Researchers have raised questions about the reliability of these methods, and policy makers and other development practitioners, the primary audience for the findings if they are to have impact, sometimes doubt the validity of findings. This paper holds up CARE's experiences with rapid assessments in Bangladesh and Tanzania to widely accepted criteria for sound social science research: basically, whether feasible and ethical methods can generate accurate, valid, and reliable results that others, such as programmers and policy makers, will find useful. Experiences in Bangladesh and Tanzania suggest that the principal challenges to the validity of rapid assessments in urban areas can be met through use of representative samples; integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches; incorporation of team members with a variety of perspectives, knowledge areas, and professions; and linkages with local organizations and community members who are familiar with the economic, political, social, and cultural context of the city.